The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India 9781107166561, 9781316711187

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The Mortal God This monograph is an ambitious study on intellectual history which uncovers how actors in colonial India imagined wildly divergent ‘sovereign figures’ – human, divine, and messianic rulers – to battle over the nature and locus of ultimate authority in the Indian polity. Many of these visions, as expressed through literary oeuvres, political texts, ceremonies, and liturgies, have never been analysed in previous scholarship. Cumulatively, they bring to visibility a secret and forgotten history of the birth of the sovereignty idioms which continue to shape modern India. Particular genealogies are explored in the landscapes of late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth century Bengal, including the associated princely states of Cooch Behar and Tripura. Global intellectual history approaches are deployed to situate India within trajectories of royal nationhood that unfolded across contemporaneous Europe and Asia. While British and elite Indian actors carved out programmes of imperial and national state sovereignty, sections of Indian middle classes as well as ‘lower caste’ and ‘tribal’ peasant populations appropriated, critiqued, constitutionalized, collectivized, and destabilized the sovereign figures. The ultimate effect was to prise open tense dialectics between domination and (in-) subordination, as socio-political hierarchies and democratic revolutions were fought out through and against vocabularies of kingly mastery. The book theorizes through these discourses on rulership and political theologies to underscore the need for decolonizing and subalternizing sovereignty, going beyond Hobbes’ notion of the state as the ‘mortal god’. The volume further argues that radical politics can be bolstered by acknowledging that sovereignty or even ‘divinity’ belongs potentially to everyone, and is not the monopoly of the state and of ruling hierarchs. In a globalized world, increasingly connected as well as fragmented along class and communitarian lines, a study of visions of sovereignty which are respectful to plurality and to the claims of rights and mastery articulated by marginalized actors, can stimulate the birth of political solidarities to come.

Milinda Banerjee teaches at the Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata and is Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany. He has co-edited Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’, and is the author of two monographs. He has also authored several journal articles and book chapters on the intersections of South Asian and transregional intellectual history.

The Mortal God

Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India

Milinda Banerjee

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 to 321, 3rd Floor, Plot No.3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107166561 © Milinda Banerjee 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-107-16656-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my Parents

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This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Amra sabai raja amader ei rajar rajatve, naile moder rajar sane milba ki svatve! We are all kings in this kingdom of our king, otherwise by what proprietary right shall we unite with our king! Rabindranath Tagore, Raja (1910)

Svaraj mane ki? Svaraj mane, nijei raja ba sabai raja. What does self-rule mean? Self-rule means, one is oneself king or everyone is king. Kazi Nazrul Islam, Editorial in Dhumketu (1922)

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Contents Acknowledgements ix Note on Transliteration

xiii

Abbreviations xv Note on Documents Used

xvii

Introduction 1 1. ‘Caesar of India’: Debating the British Monarchy and Colonial Rulership

51

2. ‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’: Imagining Sovereignty through the Princely States

108

3. ‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’: Debating National Unity

162

4. ‘One has to Rule Oneself ’: Collectivising Sovereignty in Peasant Politics

289

5. ‘God’s Kingdom Has Come’: Messianic Sovereignty in Late Colonial India

350

Conclusions and Further Thoughts

398

Index 425

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Acknowledgements Every thought bears the trace of an encounter, ‘la trace de l’Autre’, and this book is no exception. While I was interested for quite some time in examining ideas of rulership in colonial India, it was in the hospitable space of Project A5, ‘Nationising the Dynasty’ of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe’, at Heidelberg University, that I could get the opportunity of crystallising my thoughts into a doctoral dissertation. Gita Dharampal-Frick has been absolutely the best of supervisors, with her constant advice about the complexities of South Asian history and support and inspiration throughout. I am also indebted to Thomas Maissen, my second supervisor, who provoked me to relate South Asian and European history and always encouraged my global history ambitions. Both intellectually stimulated me, especially when I tried to complement the project’s focus with its logical inverse ‘Dynastising the Nation’. My colleagues in A5 – Ulrike Büchsel, Verena Gander-Lauer, Julia Schneider and Elise Wintz – offered a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. During a conference,which we organized in 2012 at the University of California, Los Angeles, I met Charlotte Backerra and Cathleen Sarti, with whom I am now co-editing a volume, titled Transnational Histories of the Royal Nation. My thoughts about placing South Asian intellectual history within a more global format of royal nationhood is indebted to all these encounters, as indeed to the ‘transcultural’ space of the Cluster: the latter has ensured that doing this dissertation has never been a solitary enterprise. I am grateful to the Heidelberg Cluster for generously funding my doctoral fellowship as well as several additional travel grants. I am also thankful for further financial support I have received from the Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund of Presidency University, the institution where I am currently employed, and from the UK-India Education and Research Initiative grant. Since 2013, I have been involved with another project at the Cluster, led by Kerstin von Lingen, on war crimes trials in East and South-East Asia. Kerstin has been a great friend and intellectual partner, and I am lucky to have a new set of colleagues in this project, Anja Bihler, Valentyna Polunina, Lisette Schouten and Ann-Sophie Schoepfel. I am grateful to the project for stimulating many thoughts on sovereignty and global history. A conference Kerstin and I organized in 2016 in Heidelberg on law, empire and global intellectual history provided much needed inspiration to me in the last stages of finishing this book. Among my friends in Heidelberg who have enriched me with their academic and non-academic

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cooperation, I must also particularly mention Simon Cubelic, Paul Gärtner, Rafael Klöber, Manju Ludwig and Sebastian Meurer. Francesco Rosada will see in this book numerous traces of our conversations on political theology. In different spaces in Germany, India, Britain, Denmark and Israel, I have also been privileged to have many fruitful conversations with Ilya Afanasyev, Christopher Bahl, Mou Banerjee, Sayan Bhattacharya, Sharmistha Chatterjee, Paromita Dasgupta, Sagarika Datta, Nicholas Dixon, Manikarnika Dutta, Felix Eickelbeck, Rotem Geva, Swastika Ghosh, Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Ulrich Hofmeister, Harshan Kumarasingham, Christoph Mauntel, Heidi Mehrkens, Egas Moniz-Bandeira, Ushri Mukhopadhyay, Souvik Naha, Monalisa Rakshit, Shahnawaz Ali Raihan, Anindya Raychaudhuri, Miriam Schneider, Max Stille, Carolien Stolte, Julian Strube and Alex Wolfers. For reasons of space, I cannot adequately acknowledge the feedback I have received from many scholars in different conferences where I presented a few ideas developed in this book, including (and apart from Heidelberg) in Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Erfurt, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Kolkata, Konstanz, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Oxford, Paris, St Andrews and Vienna. But I hope they shall recognise the imprints of their advice. I have benefited from my discussions with Sunil Amrith, Neilesh Bose, Sugata Bose, Arthur Bradley, David Cannadine, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sebastian Conrad, Faisal Devji, Amit Dey, Michael Dillon, Jörg Gengnagel, Michael Geyer, Nile Green, Martin Kämpchen, Kris Manjapra, Rila Mukherjee, Frank Lorenz Müller, Matthew Nelson, Kiri Paramore, Tansen Sen, Philip Stern, Ann Stoler, Klaus Vollmer and Bente Wolff. Two days with Ranajit Guha in Vienna were profoundly inspirational. Andrew Sartori has always offered sharp and stimulating advice; I am especially grateful to him for going through the manuscript before it went to press and for suggesting ways to improve it. In Kolkata, Presidency University has offered an intellectually stimulating and welcoming home: for this I owe much to my present and former colleagues, and particularly to Rupendra Kumar Chattopadhyay, Nirmalya Guha, Swarupa Gupta, Souvik Mukherjee and Shukla Sanyal. I thank the university administration and specifically Prithul Chakraborty, Prabir Dasgupta, Debajyoti Konar, Anuradha Lohia and Malabika Sarkar, for their constant and unstinting support in my research. My students, and especially those who participated in courses on global intellectual history, provoked and inspired me. I also record my sincerest thanks to the teachers who taught me history in Presidency College and, later, in the University of Calcutta. Obviously, a portion of this book draws on studies carried out by scholars and activists based in north Bengal and Tripura, many of whom generously shared with me their views during my visits to Cooch Behar and Tripura. The references given in this volume bear imprint of the deep debt I bear to them; indeed, without the

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Acknowledgements xi

strong traditions of activist local history nurtured there, this book could never have evolved into its present shape. I would especially thank Subir Bhaumik, Nilmoni Deb Barman, Ananda Gopal Ghosh, Ajay Misra and the staff of Birchandra State Central Library, Agartala, North Bengal State Library, Cooch Behar and University of North Bengal Library, for their help and cooperation. I am grateful to the newspaper Uttarbanga Sambad, and especially the photographer Jaideb Das, for sharing what is now the cover image of the book. The photograph offers an extraordinary visual testament to the ways in which what happens now refracts, and is refracted by, concepts and images from the past: the aim of the author, as that of a skilful photographer, is often to capture a play of multiple mirrors. But I owe my greatest debt here to Sukhbilas Barma, administrator, intellectual, scholar, Rajavamshi politician, and now also a legislator, who shared with me his invaluable private collection of Kshatriya Samiti records.

In terms of sources, I am also grateful to the staff of National Library, Kolkata, Heidelberg University Library, and Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, as well as to the archivists at the West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata, and the National Archives, New Delhi. The archivists in Kolkata have been the most cooperative of research advisers possible. I must especially thank Ananda Bhattacharyya, who led me to many of the archival documents I have used here. My deepest thanks also to Bidisha Chakraborty, Sarmistha De, Sucharita Ghose, Madhurima Sen and Jhumur Sengupta; De also shared with me a valuable manuscript of her own research on Tripura, for which I am grateful. I express my gratitude also to the Home Department, Government of West Bengal and to the officers and staff of the Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, West Bengal Police, for giving me permission to consult some of the fascinating Intelligence Branch records. Pranjit Dey has frequently rescued my research with his technical advice and IT support. Finally, I am indebted to Cambridge University Press for inviting me to publish with them. Rajesh Dey and Debjani Mazumder offered initial and invaluable encouragement; Qudsiya Ahmed has helped, often with extraordinary patience, at every stage of the publication process. Any public acknowledgement is scarred by inadequacy. If, in the above paragraphs, I have inadvertently omitted someone who has helped in the making of this book, I request them to write to me, so that, in a later edition of this work, I can make my amends. To one’s family one owes the deepest debts. My father, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, has offered precious suggestions regarding political thought and Staatlichkeit in general, and Bengali intellection in particular. My mother, Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee, has inspired me equally with her own research on the contemporary politics of West Bengal. My grandparents, Nirendranath and Sushama Chakravarti, and Birendra Kumar and Tripti Banerjee, and my uncle Krishnarup

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Chakravarti, have offered advice, inspiration and help for this book. Needless to say, my immediate and extended family have offered the warmth which makes this book possible.

While trying to build an encompassing theoretical argument, I have obviously drawn on earlier scholarship for empirical facts and theoretical clues, accumulating a huge pile of notes over seven years. I have made every effort to acknowledge these debts in the main text and in the endnotes of this book. However, if, inadvertently, I have not recorded my debt to some research, if my acknowledgement is incommensurate with the depth of my debt, or if, by rare mischance, I have cited some argument or fact without sufficient reference, I request the reader to contact me so that I can remedy the point in a future edition. In seeking to cover considerable empirical ground, I have perhaps also committed empirical errors. I crave the reader’s assistance in identifying and correcting them in future. Finally, I would be happy if the virtue of the book may be gauged by its excavation of many forgotten primary sources and political discourses from colonial India, and in redeploying these to forge new intellectual vocabularies and political ethics which can speak to, and perhaps disrupt and transform, our now.

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Note on Transliteration The majority of translations into English from Bengali sources are mine, though there are exceptions, such as the translations taken from the colonial-era Reports on the Native Newspapers of Bengal. In all cases, the nature and language of the source should be clear from the corresponding endnote. During translation, I had to grapple with the fact that the transliteration of Bengali words is notoriously difficult and has to navigate between the demands of Sanskritic orthography, Bengali pronunciation and terms derived from multiple other languages. I have followed a context-dependent transliteration, relying on a basic Sanskritic orthography for uniformity, but keeping a certain flexibility for ease of recognition in terms of Bengali pronunciation and usage, as well as for rendering terms of Persian, Arabic and European origin. Excessive homogeneity has sometimes been sacrificed for context-sensitivity. I have avoided diacritics since South Asianists would be familiar with most of the terms used.

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Abbreviations CWMG

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi

HCPP

House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers

MMP

Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India

RNPB

Report on the Native Newspapers of Bengal

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Note on Documents Used Archives National Archives of India, New Delhi Foreign Department, Government of India, Proceedings Chelmsford, Frederic Thesiger, Papers

Lytton, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Papers Montagu, Edwin Samuel, Papers

West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata Appointment Department, Reforms Branch, Government of Bengal

Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal Judicial Department, Government of Bengal, Proceedings

Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Proceedings

Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential Files Reports on the Native Newspapers of Bengal

Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, West Bengal Police (Running files consulted with special permission) Records on Uttar Khanda Dal, Section: Communal

Records on Greater Cooch Behar People’s Association and Greater Cooch Behar Democratic Party (GCPA/GCDP), Section: Communal Records on Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO), Section: Communal

Records on All India Kamtapur Students Union (AKSU), Section: Communal

Libraries Birchandra State Central Library, Agartala Heidelberg University Library

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National Library of India, Kolkata

North Bengal State Library, Cooch Behar Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, Kolkata

University of North Bengal Library, Darjeeling District

Private Collection Kshatriya Samiti Records from the collection of Mr Sukhbilas Barma

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Introduction I. Introductory Section While I was finishing this book, a series of dramatic events captured public attention in Indian media. The events centred on the Cooch Behar district of the Indian state of West Bengal: I would argue that they have a spectacular import for any serious appraisal of the modern Indian polity. They certainly illumined many of the central questions studied in this book, about the hierarchical construction, as well as eventual – if fragmented – democratisation, of sovereignty and rulership in nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia. Located in sub-Himalayan northern Bengal, on the border with Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam, Cooch Behar is a region which rarely captures much media interest, remote as it is from centres of power in New Delhi or Kolkata. Yet, in February 2016, members of the Greater Cooch Behar movement, led by Bangshi Badan Barman, came to national limelight by stopping the movement of several important trains throughout the region. Their main demand was that Cooch Behar should be granted the status of a separate state or union territory within India, but outside the state of West Bengal. The blockade, in which thousands of local people were involved, continued for days and could be ended only through massive police violence.1 In colourful photographs splashed across Indian newspapers, these insurgents were seen carrying history-evoking flags and images, including those of the most famous princely ruler of modern Cooch Behar, Nripendra Narayan (r. 1863–1911) [see cover image]. In the name of a past kingship, the agitationists were, in effect, demanding their autonomous political existence.

Some months later, another faction of the Greater Cooch Behar movement, led by Ananta Roy, again captured the attention of national media. The faction was accused of raising a people’s militia, named the Narayani Sena (an epithet derived from the old rulers of Cooch Behar, whose names carried the Narayan suffix, after the Hindu god). It was reported that Roy had built a simulacrum of the Cooch Behar princely palace in a village outside Cooch Behar town, where he held a royal court, complete with a throne, armed retinues and courtiers, even as he received regular tribute from his ‘subjects’.2 In an interview, Roy

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The Mortal God

confessed: ‘I am a king because the people here made me the king. I am a king in exile.’3 There were reports that the ‘king-in-exile’ was also behaving like a religious preceptor to his followers. Predictably enough, leading newspapers in West Bengal and India reacted with disbelief, bemusement, and above all, condescension. They expressed bewilderment that the people of Cooch Behar should be trying to revive ‘monarchy’ within a democratic nation-state. In (re-)creating a sacral kingship, sections of the people in Cooch Behar were obviously attempting to forge a new political apparatus and staking a claim to sovereignty; the Indian ruling classes scarcely knew how to react except through utter astonishment, not unmixed with hostility to such ‘pretensions’.

Yet, as this book shows, there is (at least) a century-old history to this ‘royalism’ which cannot be reduced to the ambitions and foibles of particular contemporary politicians. The Greater Cooch Behar movement draws its principal followers from the Rajavamshi community. Categorised as a Scheduled Caste – that is, as members of a socio-economically deprived community, or, in modern Indian activist stance, as a Dalit group – in fact the largest such community in contemporary West Bengal,4 the peasant-origin Rajavamshis have long claimed royal selfhood, not only for their leaders, but for every member of the community. The name ‘Rajavamshi’ (also Anglicised as Rajbansi) literally means ‘those of the royal lineage’. By claiming royal ancestry, and by associating themselves with the history of local kingships like the Cooch Behar princely state, Rajavamshis have sought to democratise kingship, and – I argue – democratise sovereignty itself in modern India. Their contemporary claim for territorial statehood – cast in terms of a revival of the defunct sovereignty of the Cooch Behar princely state, and behind it, that of the centuries-old independent Koch kingdom – embodies the climax of a decades-long, and in some senses centuries-long, process whereby martial-peasant communities of the region have claimed rulership, forged complex and durable political systems and combated exploitation by colonial political economies as well as by high-caste Hindu Bengali elites. By claiming to be royals, Rajavamshis have, in the past as well as today, been asserting their right to full citizenship, fighting back attempts by colonial and postcolonial ruling classes of India to inferiorise them. The events of 2016 cast a lightning flash on this inadequately understood history, as well as on the broader imbrications of kingship, sovereignty and democracy which this book engages with. However interesting, even magnificent, this story of the seizure of sovereign kingship by the multitudes is, it is hardly an isolated one. Across the decades in

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Introduction 3

colonial and postcolonial India, millions of people have claimed descent from royal dynasties and from royal gods. Frequently, South Asian actors – mainly of peasant, pastoral and occasionally artisanal origin – have ascribed kingly and divine descent and selfhood to their community members. Often, they have recognised the comparable status of similarly-placed groups in other regions of South Asia, in the process of forging translocal political and social solidarities with them. Sometimes, they have developed elaborate philosophies and theologies which have recognised the divinity of all human beings, or even of all beings as such, in order to demand the right of all individuals to political freedom, ethical autonomy and dignity of self and labour. Mostly, these claims have been fleshed out through militant struggles, through legally-mediated associational and electoral contestations, as well as through bloody conflicts against British and Indian elites.

The Rajavamshis themselves, again, offer a classic case in point. For example, in 1917, Panchanan Barma, the main leader of the interwar-era Rajavamshi movement, wrote a letter to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, urging that the goal of their organization, the Kshatriya Samiti, was the ‘final emancipation of the souls by the finding of the great soul in all we see’. The Bengali version of this letter, also preserved in the Kshatriya Samiti records, clarifies the vernacular roots of this soteriology, expressed in terms of the jivatma (soul/self of the individual being) and the paramatma (universal or divine soul/ self ). However metaphysical, even arcane and utterly obscure, this may sound, Barma’s letter drove home a hard political point to the British. The practical corollary of seeing the divine in every self was the claim that every human being (in this case, every Indian) had a right to ‘popular representation’ in the new legislative and executive structures which the British were evolving in the late 1910s, as part of an imperial programme of devolution of powers leading up to the Government of India Act of 1919. Barma wanted to ensure that high-caste Indian elites were not the sole beneficiaries of such representative governance; rather ‘representation must be thorough’, with proper structuring of ‘self-governing and self-improving Institutions’. Lower caste and minority groups should be given due political authority: in fact, special care should be taken to ensure that their voice and interests were secured, since ‘representatives’ of ‘the small communities […] may be easily outvoted by others’.5 The claim to collectivised kingship and divinity was a claim, in short, also for democratic – but not majoritarian – political representation.

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In ‘mainstream’, mainly high-caste-driven, public memory in India, the history (and contemporaneity) of such political philosophies has long been forgotten, or, to be more precise, marginalised, if not actively suppressed. Activist circles representing ‘lower caste’ actors – and their academic interlocutors – frequently invoke and champion some of these democratic voices, but (with some important, but limited, exceptions) the philosophical profundity of these worldviews is generally ignored by high-caste Indian social elites and their cultural canons. As for the world outside India and South Asianist scholarship, such claims by plebeianised Indians to kingly and divine selfhood remain largely unknown. Nor is it widely recognised that human, divine and messianic monarchs were routinely cited across political circles in late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century India, not merely for purposes of communitarian identity-building, and not only by peasant and other ‘subaltern’ groups, but by myriad actors from across different social strata, and for innovating varied models of sovereignty. Occasionally, visually sumptuous, but controversial, coronation ceremonies, liturgies and festivals were devised for living Indian nationalist leaders or dead Indian monarchs, even though – as is well known – India never did develop a ‘real’ national monarchy. Across the sensory ceremoniousness of liturgy, the heat of fraught political campaigns and the staid prose of textual argumentation, there was a surplus at work which has never really been sufficiently acknowledged, even by scholars: a certain gap between an excess of monarchic thinking and a deficit of monarchic politics. This book operates in this fertile gap. Despite not establishing a ‘real’ monarchic nation-state – from out of the debris of an immense monarchic empire – but with superb irony which resonates until today, modern Indian actors frequently evoked kingships, not (merely) to resurrect (or exorcise) royal spectres, but to actually construct new political bodies. There was a broader global context to this as well. Indian actors built their monarchic models through dense citations of extra-Indian models of rulership, including those emanating from Europe, Japan, West Asia, the Communist world and South-East Asia. In fact, I would argue that an intellectual history of colonial India can help us conceptualise a more expansive global history conjuncture: that of the production of royal nationhood, through entanglements between kingships and nationalist imaginaries. India is particularly instructive since it developed royal-national imaginaries through dialogues with similar models evolved from elsewhere in late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth

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Introduction 5

century Europe and Asia, despite not possessing a national monarchic state. This study, thus, illuminates a relatively unexplored chapter of modern global intellectual history: the use of monarchy as a transnational concept (and not merely as an instrumentalist power project) – the rule of one as an order of meaning – to think about the unity and sovereignty of a nation, crystallised around a singular apex. What explains the immense traction of monarchic models in modern South Asian politics? Why should we care at all? Can an intellectual history of kingship, from a South Asian perspective, speak to theories of sovereignty and democracy emanating from other parts of the world? Is there something worth listening to here? How should we deal with the almost anarchic multiplicity of visions of kingship arising from countless layers and strata of colonial India? How can we compare meaningfully, for example, a peasant claim to having a royal and divine self with a British identification of the empire itself as a providentially-ordained monarchy, or with Indian nationalist commemorations of precolonial Indian rulership? To address these questions, which also interrupt our present, my book offers the preliminary biography of an argument. To state this simply, I focus on varying ways in which multiple political actors in colonial India ascribed divine and kingly status to specific political forms and beings: to, for example, the British colonial state, or to the Indian or Indo-Islamic patrioticnational community, or to various peasant communities, or to all human beings as such. I argue that many British as well as Indian actors, while defining what ought to be the locus of sovereignty in modern South Asia – whether it was to be the empire, the nation, a community, or the individual citizen – framed their argument by ascribing kingly or divine status to the political form or being where they wished to situate sovereignty.

By unearthing arguments which imputed divinity and kingship to the common people, I also demonstrate that such arguments have been absolutely vital to democratising sovereignty in modern India, in rousing and mobilising vast publics, in struggles to free South Asia from British colonialism, in battles for human dignity, political representation, education, employment and (occasionally) territorial autonomy waged by lower caste and ‘tribal’ communities, in campaigns to free peasants and other labouring groups from high revenue and rent burdens. The discourses I analyse in this book were not just ‘oneiric horizons’,6 not just theoretical daydreams: they were weapons forged, sharpened and rusted by individuals and populations as they sought

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freedom from racial, class, sectarian, or caste stratification and violence and from different discriminatory forms of power exercised by British and Indian wielders of authority. There is something lustrous and redemptive in the ways in which actors in colonial India often sought to achieve solidarity with fellow human beings, by recognising their supposed common divinity and kingship. (Those Indian actors, such as many Muslims, who did not directly attribute divinity to human beings, also often reclaimed a divine, prophetic, or messianic mantle of authority for themselves and fellow citizens, in order to fight against British imperial or high-caste Hindu dominance, and, often, to think about a future utopian polity which would realise the Kingdom of God. My book describes such endeavours, and I include them in my orbit of thinking about democratisation of divinity.) I argue that the recognition of the divinity and kingship of a fellow being has often been a first step, an ethical and conceptual precondition, for recognising their equality and fellowship as citizens and comrades: for enabling, in short, a symmetrical normative, political and revolutionary space where some measure of democracy is attainable. My sense of optimistic evaluation is however tempered by the recognition that many of these discourses – as enunciated by British and Indian elites, as well as by ‘subaltern’ Indian actors – have also perpetuated different forms of hierarchy, violence and exploitation. To speak about the presence of divinity in one’s own community has often implied the identification of other communities as political, and even demoniac, enemies. Anti-colonial visions of sacred nationhood have frequently re-inscribed the authoritarian underpinnings of imperial political theology. Divinity and kingship in colonial India have always, with far more ease, been ascribed to community elites, and especially to men, than to lower classes or to women. (I do focus on women who created counter-hegemonic narratives though, using models of rulership to not just speak against colonialism, but also for women’s rights.) The story I offer here cannot be a triumphalist one; it is often a story of lamentable failure in ethical courage, in moral inclusiveness, in political intent. For every successful struggle against oppression I narrate, I also offer a narrative about the construction of a new exploitative hierarchy, of a disappointing re-iteration of violence. There is much here to despair about. But, for all this, there is a luminosity to the story recounted here. It is a story of openings: of politics as recognition of the self and the other as a ruler,

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Introduction 7

a sovereign, a divinity; it is a story about the brutal failures and regrettable exclusions in such imaginings. It is a story about how we can, nevertheless, build on these jagged and imperfect ideas to think about divinity, rulership and sovereignty as present in all, rather than as something monopolised by some ruling elites and hierarchs. This is a book, however, not only about ideas as dreams; it is a book about the successes and tragic failures in implementing such ideas in historical practice. This is a socially-contextualised intellectual history of notions of human, divine and messianic kingship in late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century India, with a primary focus on Bengal (including the associated princely states of Cooch Behar and Tripura.) Yet, ultimately, the histories narrated here gesture to the now. The parables of power prefigure how the future can be, about how a radical renewal is possible, if we are prepared to recognise with sincerity our fellow beings as divinities (or, which is an equivalent thing, as sharers in a divine mandate), as sovereigns, for whom and with whom we would extend solidarity in a shared struggle for better life-chances, dignity and autonomy of all, recognising at the same time the terrible fallibilities which structure and wound our interests and imaginations. How we can prise open such a political ethics and what are the risks we run in creating this ‘politics to come’,7 is what I want to discuss and historicise. Despite the title, an obvious allusion to the way in which Thomas Hobbes characterised the sovereign state in his book Leviathan (1651), this is not a volume on Hobbesian philosophy. I have cited Hobbes’s celebrated phrase for two reasons. First, this book occasionally investigates how Hobbes was cited in colonial India, especially by various Indian political actors, to articulate and debate various conceptions of sovereign statehood; these references to Hobbes serve, in a sense, as a (frequently faint, always significant) leitmotif that runs across this volume. Scholars have for some time now focused on the multiplicity of possible readings of Hobbes, from seeing him as an arch-champion of a strong and authoritative, even authoritarian, state to characterising him as belonging to the liberal, or even democratic, camp of thinkers who sought to unmask the pretensions of state authority.8 This book is not concerned with such discussions, though I do excavate how Indian actors sharply differed from each other in their readings of Hobbes. I show the specific colonial political contexts which impelled some Indians to celebrate Hobbes as a proponent of strong statehood and others to critique modern regimes of state sovereignty by castigating Hobbes. Some Indians invoked Hobbes to delicately negotiate

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between their aspiration for a centralised nation-state and their desire to embed this state within a popular-democratic contract rather than in a colonial-type superordinate force of power. In short, the book deals, in part, with a certain ‘afterlife’ of Hobbes, and – more broadly – with that of many European-origin political concepts and especially with ones relating to state sovereignty. In doing so, I embed Indian political intellection within ‘global’ frames, as I shall gradually make clear across this book. To work through conceptual afterlives – to think, for instance, about how Indian actors re-authored Hobbes, or re-authored the regimes of sovereignty for which Hobbes stood to them as a metonym – offers a point of departure here: as the historian Shruti Kapila has recently argued, ‘it is only the afterlife of Europe that will constitute something like global intellectual history, because “Europe” is now made elsewhere.’9 Simultaneously, I shall show the ways in which extra-European contexts and texts inspired my actors to write politics in transregional ways, labouring beyond transcreations of European-origin political idioms. The second and actual rationale, and far more important than a quasiHobbesian one, for the book’s title stems from the fact that I focus on certain peculiar forms of argumentation in colonial India which have been (as I observed above) all but forgotten now in academic discourse. In these argumentations – and this book is concerned with historicising and critiquing these conceptual positions – the (imperial, national and/or communitarian) polity was projected by different British and Indian actors as a god-like entity, imbued with divine presence, or even (in select discourses) as a sort of ‘human god’. These discourses, which can be found among British administrators as much as among Indian political agents from different classes and communities, involved a certain sacralisation of the state, and more broadly, of the polity. This polity could be (for British colonial actors) the existing imperial state, (for many Hindu or Muslim nationalists) the longed-for Hindu-Indian or (Indo-) Islamic nation-state, or (for many ‘lower caste’ peasant actors) the specific community to which they belonged. Underlying the obvious diversity of such political positions was a common theme, the divinisation of the political, for which Hobbes’s phrase ‘mortal god’ serves as a provocative metonym (despite the vast differences between Hobbes’s early modern European landscape and the nineteenth/twentieth century contexts that I study). I suggest that this political deployment of the divine – in all its divergent articulations – marked the complex and contested emergence of various concepts of modern state

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Introduction 9

sovereignty in colonial India. For some actors, this involved a visualisation of the specific political form being discussed as indeed imbued with divinity. For others, as also in case of Hobbes’s mortal god, the divine appeared as a node of comparison, analogy and allegory. In tune with recent scholarship on early modern and modern Europe, I give importance to the ‘linguistic’ usage of political-theological metaphors, as also to their deployments in political forums beyond that concerning the state narrowly conceived.10 To re-iterate, in colonial India, languages of political thought, cutting across race, class and community frontiers, became saturated with theologicallyinflected concepts. To explain why this happened, why political thought – intellection about the state and about other political forms – became simultaneously theological thought is one of my central tasks. However, the ultimate aim of this book is not solely to be preoccupied with these imbrications of the theological and the political. The imbrications offer me a privileged angle, a microcosm, to tackle broader – and in some ways, even far more interesting – questions about the construction and fragmentation of concepts of sovereignty in modern India. I am interested in studying the ways in which diverse political actors, from different social locations, have sought to imagine and realise into existence variegated political forms, and the manner in which some (though obviously not all) of them have created in the process rich argumentations about democratic being that may stimulate us even today, and be worth a (not uncritical) recuperation. The divinisation of the political – of comparing the polity and/or its rulers and denizens to godhood – was part of a more complicated intellectual spectrum of discourses on rulership, including about human kingship. While deploying vocabularies of rulership to debate the state, many of the actors I study spoke in terms of the ‘sovereign’, rather than in terms of an abstract notion of ‘sovereignty’. In Anglophone discourses, among British and Western-educated Indian actors, this distinction is clear enough. I suggest that even in Bengali discourses, including those among peasant actors, analogous and comparable discussions on the ‘sovereign’ figure can be found. To explain and theorise on the valence of this sovereign figure in modern South Asia constitutes the central preoccupation of this book. I shall show that British as well as Indian elites often sought to justify the construction of a sovereign state, imperial or national, by deliberately crafting ideas of benevolent rulership, as opposed to the more ‘impersonal’ functioning of sovereignty in its abstract and institutionalised form. Though couched in terms

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of the ‘sovereign’ ruler, these ideas were integrally part of novel programmes of constructing state sovereignty in South Asia. Various Asian and European exemplars of welfare-oriented human and divine monarchy were cited in order to vocalise these enunciations about the sovereign. Depending on the specific context, such discourses supported the British Empire as well as South Asian dreams of a future Indian or Indo-Islamic nation-state.

Peasant politics often drew on vocabularies of rulership which cannot be completely assimilated into Western-modern discourses on state sovereignty. They embodied communitarian and collectivist forms of authority and sometimes relied on messianic articulations. However, such perspectives were partly commensurable with modern sovereignty idioms, enabling peasantand ‘tribal’- origin communities to either stake claim within South Asian (imperial and nationalist) state structures, or, as two of my case studies indicate, to eventually demand territorial states oriented towards their communities and with varying aspirations for sovereignty or autonomy. The resultant idioms of mastery often radically transformed elite ideas of state sovereignty. This divergence needs to be conceptually retrieved, even as we should avoid impressions of absolute dissonance between ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’ grammars; there were ideological, material and ritual networks that connected different social strata. The importance of studying these discourses about the sovereign figure exceeds the academic. Even today, across South Asia, nationalist/communitarian identities and conflicts, including often rather violent ones, are frequently mediated through contestations about rival sovereign icons. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Mughal and Maratha monarchs prove to be battlegrounds for sectarian nationalists;11 regional rulers like the Ahom kings provide inspiration for local nationalisms;12 lower caste activists against high-caste dominance take inspiration from past monarchs, or even project themselves as heirs of royal dynasties, in their bid to democratise the body politic.13 Different understandings of the divine, of godhood itself conceptualised in monarchic terms, fuel the construction of political grammars. This book provides a genealogical account to explain why human and divine monarchs (as well as messiahs) have proved such fecund and resilient sources for political expression in (what are today) seemingly democratic political systems in South Asia.

This book does not offer any singular definition of ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’; rather it aims to historicise the plural definitions of ‘sovereign’ presence that

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Introduction 11

were sculpted out by specific political actors in the context of colonial India. Each sovereign figure I study was like a sun around which emerged a specific discursive planetary system. To understand these discursive orders, I carefully track English and Bengali language discourses through which multiple notions of sovereign rulership were etched out. As a point of departure however, remembering traditional definitions of the English word ‘sovereign’ may be quite helpful. As the Oxford English Dictionary records, the term originates, via French, from the Latin superanus, and ultimately, super. From at least the thirteenth century, as a noun (considering varying orthographies), it has referred to ‘One who has supremacy or rank above, or authority over, others; a superior; a ruler, governor, lord, or master (of persons, etc.). Freq. applied to the Deity in relation to created things.’ More specifically, it has come to denote ‘The recognized supreme ruler of a people or country under monarchical government; a monarch; a king or queen.’ In adjectival contexts, apart from being used ‘Of persons: Having superior or supreme rank or power; spec. holding the position of a ruler or monarch’, it has come to be used since the early modern period as a term for ‘states, communities, etc.’, especially to convey the sense ‘Of power, authority, etc.: Supreme’.14

The related term ‘sovereignty’ (again through shifting orthographies) has denoted, from at least the fourteenth century, ‘Supremacy in respect of power, domination, or rank; supreme dominion, authority, or rule’, and more specifically, ‘The position, rank, or power of a supreme ruler or monarch; royal authority or dominion.’ Gradually, in the modern world, it has also come to refer to: ‘The supreme controlling power in communities not under monarchical government; absolute and independent authority.’15 It would be pertinent to add, from our transregionally-inflected intellectual history framework, that, at least from the sixteenth century, the terms ‘sovereign’ and ‘sovereignty’ in European-language discourses have not only contributed to the emergence of modern grammars of state sovereignty, but have also done so by engaging with extra-European, including South Asian, state forms. Later in this book, I shall more systematically discuss the interactions between European and Indian political vocabularies (in the colonial era), but for now would only cite one example. In his canonical volume, Les Six Livres de la République (1576; Latin edition, De Republica Libri Sex, 1586; English translation, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1606), Jean Bodin defined sovereignty through a resolutely comparative framework. A prince was absolutely sovereign (absoluement souverain; in English, ‘absolute

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Soveraigne’), if, like the true monarchs (vrais Monarques; in English, ‘true Monarques’) of France, Spain, England, Scotland, Ethiopia, Turkey, Persia and Muscovy (the Latin edition adds: and of the Indians, Indorum, as well as gives a generic reference to different kingdoms of Africa and Asia), he did not share his sovereignty (souveraineté; in English, ‘soveraigntie’) with his subjects. The subjects here had no right to attack the honour or life of the monarch, since all power (toute puissance) and authority to command (authorité de commander) depended on the prince.16

It is not my intention to set out, like Bodin, a catalogue of ‘the true markes of Soveraigntie’, nor attempt a European, let alone ‘global’, concept history of shifting delineations of sovereignty.17 What I illuminate, however, is the obvious significance of a dyad: sovereign/sovereignty. By focusing on this dyad, and especially on its first term, we can see how idioms of kingship have been central to the birth of abstract notions of political sovereignty: to visualise how this was the case in colonial India is one of my principal aims. By foregrounding the sovereign, I go beyond an exclusive focus on norms of state sovereignty. For me, the term ‘sovereign’ is capacious enough to capture multiple locations: it looks back to centuries-old, and yet ever-changing and modernising, notions of kingship, while also encoding possibilities of non-royal political sovereignty. For the purposes of this volume, the ‘sovereign’ figure represents the idea of a supreme, or at least superior, authority, a locus of rulership, a node of – legitimate and elevated, but not necessarily omnipotent, absolutist, or uncontested – power and authority to command. In British eyes, as well as in the perspectives of Indian actors who accepted the legitimacy of colonial rule, the superordinate and paradigmatic human sovereign was generally the British monarch, embodying the sovereignty of the British imperial state. Protestant Christian ideas of providential-divine authority often lurked in the background. Contrastively, in the eyes of many South Asian nationalists (of Hindu as well as Muslim origin), a nationalised conception of divine or human rulership often served as the sovereign figure. God, as well as different mythical and historical human rulers, were generally cast as the embodiments of patriotic sovereignty. The idea of the sovereign nation-state frequently crystallised in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century India around mythohistorical figures of specific rulers. Complex overtures were made to link the sovereignty of the nation-people with that of the invoked divine or human ruler. I shall demonstrate that these conceptual negotiations ultimately

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Introduction 13

impelled most South Asian nationalists to refrain from attempting to build an actual Indian or Indo-Islamic national monarchy. Admittedly, there were some Indian reformist and nationalist attempts at casting native princes as patriotic regional monarchs. However, broadly speaking, in varying nationalist discourses, the divine or mythohistorical human ruler-sovereign remained an icon for nationalist mobilisation, an inspirational figure to represent the longed-for sovereignty of the future nation-state (or even, in Indo-Islamic discourses, of a transnational political community), but not the historical possibility of an actual national monarchy. The term ‘sovereign’, as set out in the title of this book, sets out to capture the rich ironies involved in this surplus of monarchic thinking, juxtaposed with the emergence of resolutely non-royal forms of practical politics. British imperial and Indian elite-nationalist projects often approximated Bodin’s or Hobbes’s imaginaries about building state sovereignties. If we focus solely on these state discourses however, we risk leaving out a very large spectrum of non-elite political intellection centring on divine, human and messianic rulers. I take a deliberate step in arguing that when peasant actors claimed divine and regal identity for their communities, they were also producing innovative and revolutionary definitions of the sovereign; in fact, they crafted their own insurgent selves as sovereigns by deploying vernacular terms for supreme or superior rulership. Often, they also mobilised around the idea of a messianic ruler. To cast these political discourses as being about the sovereign/ sovereignty dyad may seem a bold argument to make, especially since these seem apparently so distanced from modern-Western notions of state sovereignty. Yet, these discourses were in the end about capturing and transforming (colonial or postcolonial) state power, and thus, ultimately about revolutionising concepts and practices of sovereignty. In a similar vein, it would be inaccurate to distinguish between ‘modern-Western’ and ‘non-Western/Indian’ conceptions of sovereignty too rigidly. This book is more interested in investigating the intersections between multiple ideational loci than in constructing or reinforcing civilizational binaries. After all, modern Indian peasant ideas frequently intersected with multiple Western-origin institutional and discursive frameworks of political authority. The results were visible in ‘hybrid’ sovereign figures of multi-sited provenance. By bringing these discourses into my study of sovereign figures, I aim at expanding the investigation of modern South Asian political thought beyond elite confines. I argue that when peasants claimed to be regal beings, or longed for a messianic saviour, new icons of the sovereign were crafted, which

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deserve our theoretical appraisal, not the least because these processes enduringly transformed structures of state sovereignty and politics as well.

In this book, I occasionally use a concept with some amount of flexibility: ‘monism/monistic’. A basic dictionary definition of ‘monism’ would refer to ‘Any theory, or system of thought or belief, that assumes a single ultimate principle, being, force, etc., rather than more than one.’18 I have deployed the term, as a noun and as an adjective, to refer to multiple ways in which British or Indian actors (or actors elsewhere in the world) sometimes embedded their conceptions of political sovereignty in unitary principles, which could (depending on the contingent context) be a principle of civilization, of order, of progress, of divine authority, of national-popular will and identity, and the like. I use the term in a capacious and non-specialist sense (I do not, for example, get into debates about legal monism); however I do underline how, for some Indian actors at least, ‘monism’ became a self-consciously articulated category to think about theology in relation to politics. I obviously do not wish to state that monistic argumentation modes encompassed empirical reality. The colonial state never achieved any level of complete monistic sovereignty: the heterogeneous sovereignties of the princely states, the divergences in communitarian legal systems and the sheer diversity of administrative or fiscal arrangements in South Asia, all militated against the construction of a monolithically centralised imperial state sovereignty. South Asian nationalist actors had to constantly negotiate as well the cultural-political diversity of the subcontinent’s vast populace. However, I would still make the case that many of the discourses I study were constructed in a ‘monistic’ mode. They assumed, sometimes implicitly and at times explicitly, that there was, or could potentially be, a singular centre of righteous authority (human and/or divine), a singular ideological standard, with reference to which various kinds of everyday political sovereignty had to be idealised, if not actually constructed. Many (though not all) British and Indian actors aimed at (colonial or nationalist) centralised state construction, and part of their rationale for aiming at this had to do with their discursive stances, which I am interested in studying. Concurrently, I analyse contradictions within British colonial and various South Asian discourses. I highlight those intellectual strands which sought to ‘ethically’ grapple with, and at times champion, polycentric distributions of political power. I suggest that debates about sovereign figures provided sites in which these contestations on the morphologies of state authority took place.

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15

To understand the framing contexts of these variegated discourses on sovereign rulership, the volume takes serious account of socio-economic, political, administrative, military and legal transformations, including British colonial policies of revenue maximisation, demilitarisation and legal homogenisation, anti-colonial Indian constitutionalism and economic nationalism, and subaltern (peasant and working-class) campaigns for more just redistribution of material resources, for schemes of positive discrimination in education, jobs and politics, and against high revenue and rent burdens. But I shall confess that the reader who is interested in economic, juridical, military, or political histories of sovereignty-building in modern South Asia should look elsewhere for guidance. This book is not principally or primarily about the material processes of sovereign state construction in modern India. To undertake such a task would be to retrace the works of several generations of scholars who are referenced in this volume; it would in any case fill up many miles of bookshelves. Only in case of two relatively small (and therefore manageable, from a monograph perspective) regions, Cooch Behar and Tripura, do I go into any detail to demonstrate the manner in which intellectual discourses among various groups of British and Indian elites, as well as among peasant communities, were intimately related to far-ranging political-economic transformations in the regions and the reshaping of martial-peasant communities in strategically important borderlands. By centrestaging the ‘sovereign’, I intend to provide an analytically sharp and distinct, though by no means all-comprehensive, account of intellectual processes of sovereignty-construction in the subcontinent. Analogies, metaphors, parables and comparisons regarding the sovereign are seriously treated here as constitutive of political language. While doing so, I do not want to portray South Asia as a particularly exceptional or exotic location where human and divine rulers have been at the centre of political thought in a way which has not been the case in other self-styled ‘modern’ societies. The centrality of rulership ideas to the construction of modern notions of state sovereignty in Europe has been, for example, investigated in quite some detail by now. Carl Schmitt famously related monistic concepts of state sovereignty to monotheistic ideas of rulership. Schmitt advocated a strong, commanding and singular locus of sovereign authority and associated with the Nazi regime in Germany; the present author obviously finds no ground of sympathy for such intellectual locations. Nevertheless, Schmitt’s ideas merit critical attention, if only to ‘deconstruct’ sacralised narratives of state construction among British and Indian actors. To quote him:

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All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent law-giver – but also because of their systematic structure […].19

E. H. Kantorowicz further historicised this notion of ‘political theology’. He showed that the idea of the state emerged in late medieval and early modern Europe in part through the idea of a quasi-mystical and permanent corporate body of the Christ-like European monarch; the structure of state sovereignty was thus embedded in Christian theological assumptions.20 In his words, ‘when finally the Nation stepped into the pontifical shoes of the Prince, the modern ABSOLUTE STATE, even without a Prince, was enabled to make claims like a Church.’21 This book argues that British and Indian elites similarly formulated monarchic and monotheistic ideas of rulership to generate grammars of state sovereignty in South Asia. For many colonial rulers, the British imperial monarchy offered a ritual face for monistic sovereignty; underlying this were also ideological assumptions inflected with Protestant Christian monotheism and Roman images of imperator. In precolonial India, regimes of kingship had existed in conflict and complicity with decentralised formats of community rule and localised hierarchies. The British accentuated frameworks of legal homogenisation, revenue maximisation, bureaucratic authority and military centralism, and sought to demilitarise and subjugate the subcontinent’s armed peasant populations. Crucial to the success of this manoeuvre was British administrative alliance with, and strengthening of, Indian literate gentry, princes, big landholders and merchant groups. The result was to intensify different aspects of social hierarchy in India. It is this construction of a hierarchical sovereign state which was narrativised through the pomp and spectacle of monarchy, through imperial durbars, princely visits and celebrations of royal jubilees. The British also augmented the authority of Indian princes, using them to keep in check and coercively ‘pacify’ their subjects. The ‘monarchisation’ of politics in the princely states under colonial aegis often marked the advent of a modern state sovereignty system in these areas. Several British administrators, politicians and intellectuals poeticised the state in India as a secularised divinity. As Sir Alfred Lyall wrote in an essay published in 1884,22 so ‘firmly had the groundwork of our sovereignty in India been already established’,23 that probably ‘no government in the world has

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Introduction

17

approached more nearly, by its attributes or its authority, to Hobbes’s ideal of the Leviathan, than the English Government in India’. Quoting Hobbes, Lyall described the British government as an ‘all-powerful sovereignty’, ‘that mortal god to whom we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence’.24 The justification of this mortal god, as of all European conquests in Asia, was ‘to extend and consolidate civilisation’ against ‘the strength and power of resistance possessed by barbarism entrenched behind the unchanging conditions of Asiatic existence’.25 In material terms, colonial revenue regimes intensified landlordoriented property rights, which either (as in Bengal) bolstered kingliness among the Indian landlords, or (as in southern and western India) led to the ‘modern’ state taking a landlord’s vestments, disguising itself as an ‘Asiatic’ monarch. Thus, Lyall noted that: [...] as the latest modern ideas are constantly disinterred from beneath the obsolete remains of some primitive institution, so in India we find the theory of the State being sole landlord, which is the latest expression of socialism, and the doctrine of the State’s claim to the ‘unearned increment’, which is the last word of democratic finance, joining hands with the old despotic rule and simple plan whereby the Asiatic conqueror declares himself lord of the ryots […].26

In his book Asiatic Studies, Lyall cited Eusebius of Caesarea to relate the unification of the Roman Empire under one emperor to the unification of belief under one God: ‘And as the knowledge of one God was, by the teaching of our Saviour, delivered to all men; so also one king was established over the whole Roman Empire, and a profound peace prevailed...’27 Lyall felt that British imperial centralisation would similarly lead to the destruction of ‘polytheism’ in India, intensifying monotheism among Hindus and Muslims.28 Not all British actors pursued monistic political theologies. This book highlights voices which sought to critique the authoritarian underpinnings of colonial rule, and to (partially) make imperial rule more consonant with liberalconstitutionalist frameworks of governance. Further, it needs to be recognised that the imperial state systemically left open many nodes of polycentricity of power and meaning. The princely states, to take the most glaring example, offered potential (and sometimes, realised) spaces of counter-hegemonic opposition to British rule. The British monarchy too was a polysemic institution, whose promises of good governance were hijacked by Indian actors to demand

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from the colonial state welfare-oriented, and even representative, forms of governance. The flexibility present in colonial monarchic structures eased, in some ways, the graduated transfer of political powers to Indians across the early-mid-twentieth century. These actual and potential possibilities of plurality within the conceptual and institutional structures of British monarchic-imperial rulership are also noticed in this volume. At the same time, I readily confess that this book’s principal focus has been on Indian actors and not on British ones.

Monotheistic and monarchic discourses were debated by Indians through political treatises, literary fiction, newspaper discussions, ‘seditious’ pamphlets, theatre and newly invented rituals and festivals. Many Indian politicians and intellectuals argued that the unity of the future Indian or Indo-Islamic nationstate would be based on the unity of divinity; various mythical and historical rulers were also recast as national monarchs who offered blueprints of public leadership. Monotheistisation was sometimes the price for creating a unified national community. This occasionally led to the marginalisation of older Indic and Indo-Islamic cosmologies based on multiple divine and supernatural agents. Polarisation between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ politics in the late colonial period was embedded as much in contestations over political theologies of sovereignty as in material anxieties and class tensions. In these fables of rulership, male elites often led the nation to freedom and ‘righteously’ governed the lower classes and women. However, subalterns were also promised some improvement in material life and ideological worth. The body of the nation-state was carved out in this modern mythology as the sacralised body of the divine or human monarch. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s Svapnalabdha Bharatavarsher Itihasa (History of India as Seen in a Dream, 1875) offers an illustration. Drawing in part on the ‘Purusha Sukta’ hymn of the Rgveda and on caste (varna) classification, Bhudev visualised the body of the Indian nation as the godlike body of its imagined national ruler (samrat): As God’s cosmic iconic form (virat murti) extends through the universe, so does the ruler’s body extend throughout India. Agriculturist and industrial labourer subjects constitute the lower part of his body, merchants and wealthy individuals are the middle portion, warriors and royal officials are his arms, the scholars are his head, and this council is his mouth.29

The ruler instituted a policy of protecting Indian industries and of promoting the economic welfare and education of the people. Hence, Bhudev praised

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him even if this fantasy kingdom did not practice British parliamentary or French republican politics. The desire for national sovereignty and a nationalist economic programme converged in the physique of the monarch.30

These discourses were embedded in transcontinental borrowing of ideas. The British compared their monarchic programmes with those in Imperial Germany, the Habsburg Empire and Tsarist Russia and with past empires like those of the Romans. South Asian nationalists invoked British, German, Italian, Japanese, West Asian and South-East Asian exemplars to sketch their own models of rulership. As Indian intellectuals travelled abroad, some of them publicised their views about rulership among international audiences. Many claimed their ideas on kingship to be comparable or superior to European ones. Bhudev thus asserted that Indian theories about religion-legitimated social control of the king resembled European notions of social contract (samajika chuktivada); they made the ruler a representative of society (rajar samajapratibhutva). The Indian worldview also justified punishment and destruction of tyrants. However the Indian rule of dharma-law was supposedly superior to European reflections in providing a stronger moral limitation on governance. In contrast to Lyall, Bhudev suggested that the Indian king had never been a despot who owned the property (svatva) of his subjects. Such a notion of royal ownership of property had come about in England due to the Norman Conquest, and had later been transplanted into India by the British to create an exploitative fiscal structure.31 Monarchic projects were thus also challenged in the colony. Many Indians denounced the British sovereign as a fake king; as one newspaper commented in 1906 about the visit of the Prince of Wales (future George V) to India: ‘With Europeans, royal personages are like dolls – moved by springs, worked by machine.’32 The critique of colonial power as an impersonal mechanical technology bereft of any personal interest in the welfare of the ruled, was a leitmotif of anti-colonial opposition. Colonial sovereignty was deconstructed as a series of illusions based on economic extraction and administrative control in an industrialising world, which only deceptively assumed the appearance of a monarch. The monistic authority claims of the state were here unravelled as constituted by plural forces of exploitation. South Asian nationalists often read precolonial Indian or Islamic history in democratising ways, to suggest that cognates of Western democratic practices could be found in their own traditions of rulership. Such perspectives date to the nineteenth century, but they increased in volume (and academic rigour) in

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the interwar years, in tandem with growing Indian demand for representative government and with accelerated colonial reforms that devolved political powers to Indians. Some Indians went further in denouncing frameworks of state sovereignty altogether, along with their monarchic underpinnings, holding them culpable for authoritarian violence. Aurobindo Ghose33 thus commented on ‘the transformation of the monarchical sovereignty into the sovereignty of the people’ in European history;34 this was part of a broader trajectory through which in ‘modern times the State idea has after a long interval fully reasserted itself and is dominating the thought and action of the world’. He felt that both monarchic and popular sovereignty stifled individual liberties: We must, again, note one other fact in connection with the claim of the State to suppress the individual in its own interest, that it is quite immaterial to the principle what form the State may assume. The tyranny of the absolute king over all and the tyranny of the majority over the individual –­ which really converts itself by the paradox of human nature into a hypnotised oppression and repression of the majority by itself – are forms of one and the same tendency.35

Indian nationalists never arrived at any consensus about rulership. Many of them desired a strong executive state underpinned by a unified structure of sovereignty which would protect the nation from colonial aggression and promote economic and social progress. Others felt that such a state would replicate the authoritarianism implicit in kingship or in European types of aggressive racial nationalism, and thus, not be able to promote true democratisation. No viable programme of creating a national monarchy emerged in India, though various shades of bureaucratic-nationalist, socialist and right-wing authoritarian opinion supported a strong centralist executive.

In quest of substantive democratisation, peasant and ‘tribal’ populations launched their own campaigns to wrest political power from British and Indian elites and to pursue welfare for their communities, for example, by promoting greater literacy, encouraging business initiatives and agitating for job creation and reservation. I show how behind these campaigns there often lay sophisticated models of shared and decentralised rulership and sovereignty. Lower caste politicians and intellectuals often claimed divine identity and royal genealogy for peasants. These exegeses were substantiated through festivals, parades and martial games to demonstrate community prowess as well as

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through legislative politics, social work, or (in extremis) armed militancy. Horizontal expressions of peasant solidarity existed here in dialogue with vertical enunciations of community honour. Though inflected with hierarchical norms, peasant politics nevertheless possessed emancipatory potential, not merely for peasant elites, but to some extent also for lower class men and women. I focus on concepts of mastery – terms such as kshatriyatva, bhagavatva, naradeva, lokapala and bhupala – through which peasant politicians attempted to carve out the sovereignty of their community members, while hybridising these concepts of individual and community self-rule (atmashasana) with Western-modern democratic-socialist idioms and organizational frameworks. An exemplary case is offered by Panchanan Barma who passionately declared during a community meeting in 1927 that ‘the Kshatriya is the true God’, while justifying that his (peasant) community members were Rajavamshis, and therefore Kshatriyas, and hence of divine nature.36 I argue that the pluralistic nature of modern Indian democratisation owes as much to these grammars of peasant rulership, with their lineages in precolonial community structures and models of segmented rule, as to European-origin institutions and styles of formal democratisation. Given the hankering for a strong elite-led nation-state among sections of the Western-educated Indian middle classes, peasant politics might have been decisive in tipping the balance in favour of grassroots democratisation and federalist pluralism in late colonial and postcolonial India. British as well as Indian elites often used monarchic and monotheistic imageries to advance programmes of social ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’, and to make societies and people ‘modern’. By analysing these terminologies (also in their Indianised versions, such as unnati, hita and adhunika), I argue that notions of modernity were crafted in colonial India partly through idioms of sovereign rulership. Conversely, peasant and other labouring communities produced their own repertoires of progress, sometimes articulated through languages of graduated upward mobility, and at other moments through violent millenarian movements embedded in dreams of creating a utopia free from different forms of ‘oppression’, including from high rent and revenue exactions, forest taxes and low-paid wage labour. Sometimes the militants hoped for a messianic ruler, deriving inspiration from Indic and Islamic vocabularies of righteous governance (rule by avataras or by the Mahdi) and integrating local grievances with translocal (such as ‘Gandhian’, pan-Islamic and Communist) horizons of justice. Belief in a messianic superior coexisted with ascetic efforts to transform

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an individual himself (much less frequently, herself ) into a sovereign messianic being. Messianic parables of perfectibility expanded the politics of sovereignty in colonial India. The periodic eruption of ‘messiahs’ in South Asia is a testament to the decentralised nature of political-theological thinking and social power in the region; in the colonial period, this facilitated large-scale attempts to democratise politics through collectivised messianism. An example can be found in Kazi Nazrul Islam, who was imprisoned by the British in 1923 (in the aftermath of the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement) for his ‘seditious’ writings that supported anti-colonial militancy. For him, divinity and the messianic mantle were immanent in all human beings; hence everyone deserved basic democratic rights and could rebel against unjust authority. As he noted in his poem ‘Manush’ (Human Being), published as part of Samyavadi (Egalitarian, 1925): ‘Maybe Kalki arrives in me, the Mahdi and Jesus in you. […] Brother, whom do you hate, whom do you kick? Maybe in the heart of that one, God remains awake through day and night!’37 I demonstrate that such messianism-inflected writings emanated from broader rural and urban lower class worlds of rumours and beliefs which cast the fight against the British as a messianic struggle. By examining variegated models of human, divine and messianic rulership, I underline the contestations which went into the making of regimes of sovereignty in modern India. Rulership offered a space for normativising social inequality, for normalising exploitative apparatuses of racial, religious, class, caste and gender hierarchy. Sovereignty was crafted by British and Indian ruling groups as a dramaturgy, a theatre of power, which articulated as well as masked a range of practices relating to coercive labour extraction and resource mobilisation. The state was projected as a seductive entity such that it was romanticised as a mortal (and kingly) god. Simultaneously and paradoxically, through disputes on rulership, different categories among the disenfranchised sculpted out their aspirations for justice, destabilising British colonial and elite Indian attempts to maintain hegemony. In some middle-class Indian perspectives and in peasant programmes, strategies were evolved to imbue the common people with divinity and rulership; these discursive contracts aimed at re-ordering the political system by gaining (back) sovereignty for the ruled. In strands of British colonial and elite Indian ideology, state sovereignty was founded on the ‘ethical’ unity of divinity and of righteous order (in Indian languages, often described as dharma, the basis of dharmarajya, righteous

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kingdom/polity). Such ‘righteous’ sovereignty was seen as the preserve of imperial or national elites who would act as the guardians of the people. Ethical monism justified a commanding statism. Conversely, in those rebel visions which emphasised the immanent presence of divinity and rulership in multitudes, politics was cast (at least rhetorically) in terms of the recognition of the right and ability of many, or even all, to act as saviours, as guardians of the community and as full citizens. This politics of seeing the sovereign was a politics of epiphany, or, to use the term often used by Indian actors, of darshana, visualisation. But epiphany was also fragmented by social difference.

In a short study published in 1935 entitled ‘Monotheism as a Political Problem’, the German theologian Erik Peterson insisted that Christian Trinitarian theology, different as it was from ‘monotheism’ and rooted as it was in an eschatological future, could not be used to justify present-day monarchic (or dictatorial) forms of governance. Peterson’s challenge to Schmitt’s notion of political theology and to the Third Reich’s claim to an ersatz sacrality has earned him lasting fame, even though he did not wish to dissociate theology from politics as such.38 One may compare Peterson to Ranajit Guha who, in a 1993 lecture, underlined the importance of theologically-inflected ideas of perfectibility in nineteenth century Bengal, especially in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. If Peterson’s opponent and interlocutor was Schmitt (and Roman-Christian theologians like Eusebius), Guha’s was none other than Hegel and the latter’s racialised temporality of progress; more generally, he wished to critique some of the imperious hegemonic claims of European-modern discourses. Contrastively, Guha posited ideas of perfectibility which were enracinated in the specificities of colonial society, ‘constituting the colonized as a human subject’.39 The two polemics, by Peterson and by Guha, are comparable, despite the divergent ideological contours of the authors. Both attacked stateoriented authoritarian visions, by putting at stake alternative public theologies. This book responds to similar questions, even if my theorisation differs from Peterson’s and Guha’s. Shared and democratised programmes of rulership, embedded in the identification of disempowered groups with divinity and regality, can aid us to re-imagine sovereignty beyond elite narratives of state power and political-economic dominance. Such activist instantiation of theology is no less political or public than Schmitt’s, though it has a more expansive emancipatory potential. Recent historical works have sensitised us to the myriad ways in which

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sovereignty and sovereign rulership have been imagined by ‘Western’ thinkers in relation to democratic theories and practices. From Richard Tuck’s study of early modern European discourses on the ‘sleeping sovereign’,40 and Alexei Yurchak’s analysis of the Soviet Communist ‘party-sovereign’,41 to James Martel’s subversive de-centring of notions of state sovereignty through his readings of canonical European thinkers, from Hobbes to Walter Benjamin,42 to consider just a few instances: we have a rich canvas of intellectual history studies which unearth icons of sovereign rulership in order to detect their cooperative as well as antagonistic relation to the birth and future possibilities of democratic politics. I offer a complementary study from the angle of a colonised society, foregrounding how actors from different social strata radically transformed icons of sovereign rulership as they sought to build new sites and scales of constitutional and/or popular politics. Scholars have often drawn the lineages of concepts and practices of popular sovereignty in the modern world to European (and North American) histories: these are important narratives which deserve our attentive study.43 But there are also other stories which remain waiting to be told, about decolonisation and democratisation in the extra-European world, using concepts which may appear unfamiliar and uncanny, which work through seemingly strange cosmologies of sovereign rulership, and may yet inspire, tremble, and shatter our ways of thinking. By studying specific techniques and strategies resorted to by certain Indian actors to proliferate conceptual schemas of sovereign rulership, I ultimately attempt to theorise about how sovereignty can be re-dreamt as something which everyone can aspire for. In a globalised world, which is increasingly connected as well as fragmented along class and communitarian lines, a study of ways of envisioning sovereignty which are respectful to plurality and to the needs of the marginalised (and not merely embedded in homogenised constructions of a supposedly singular nation-people), possesses more than academic value. These discussions offer exemplars on how transregionally connected, as well as locally instantiated, apparatuses of power asymmetry can be combated by disempowered groups and individuals as they integrate their specific rights-claims and imaginative consciousness of mastery with translocal programmes of pursuing social justice. In these discourses, the sovereign was figured as the one who transformed reality: or, to put this more historically, was the mobilising point and signifier for a range of world-changing insurgencies. In the name of various sovereigns, political actors ultimately sought to revolutionise

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the world they inhabited, disrupting the operations of multiple lineaments of authority. Such ideas invite critical scrutiny in relation to the assertions of power they encode. But they also demand a careful retrieval, for they enfold transformative hopes that we may build upon, if only by turning the counterhegemonic – often ethical and democratic – strands embedded in them against the tools of dominance that they simultaneously enunciate.

II. State of research This section focuses on scholarly discussions on singular rulership in a crosstemporal context, to better contextualise developments in colonial India. Ancient Indo-European worlds offer a point of departure, given their salience to modern Indian debates. In this regard, Georges Dumézil has argued about the normative superiority of sacral-juridical authority over martial prowess in Indo-European societies, with the kingly office operating at their intersections.44 A quasimonotheistic idea of divinity emerged early in Iran (perhaps accentuating IndoEuropean philosophies of singular moral-natural order) and, in conjunction with monarchic ideologies, justified state construction.45 In late second/first millennium BCE northern India, emergent kingships contributed to the systematisation of Vedic orthodoxy and left an impact on discussions about royal governance in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.46 The connection between sacral order and kingship was maintained in South Asia by the third century BCE Mauryan ruler Ashoka, who drew on Buddhism and cited Hellenistic vocabularies; Achaemenid Iran also cast a shadow.47 By the early first millennium CE, notions of sacred rulership offered a common ground for emulation and competition between Kushana-ruled South Asia, Iran, China, West Asia and the Roman world; Christian and Islamic reflections on monarchy and monotheism ultimately emerged from within this connected milieu.48 In the fourth and fifth centuries, Gupta kings in India promoted the god Vishnu and his incarnations as part of their governance ideology, bridging elite and popular cults of saviours,49 even as Christianity got Roman imperial sanction.

Taking a wide-ranging comparativist view, Sheldon Pollock has argued about similarities between ancient India and Rome in terms of ideals of imperial literary culture. However, there were differences: ‘No imperial formation arising in the Sanskrit cosmopolis ever stationed troops to rule over conquered territories. No populations were ever enumerated. No uniform code of law

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was ever enforced anywhere across caste groupings, let alone everywhere in an imperial polity.’ Indian kings were compared to gods, but ‘the king was not the object of the kind of worship offered to deity’, and ‘kings were never the center of a royal cult’ as was the case with Roman emperors. The Indic divinity did not function as ‘a granter of heavenly mandate, a justifier of rule, a transcendent real-estate agent awarding parcels of land’ in the manner of Rome. In Rome, and in Roman-influenced models of rule later adopted by European powers, Pollock identifies a sense of ethnic leadership and providentially-mandated imperial destiny, something which was allegedly absent in ancient India.50 The absence of such a centralised statist sensibility in India can be attributed to many factors. As generations of scholars have shown (I summarise their research here), South Asia’s geographical heterogeneity – with river valleys counterbalanced by large forests, grasslands, hills, and even deserts – contributed to a variegated political ecology within which centralising kingships had to contend with multiple pastoral-nomadic, martial-peasant, and forest-dwelling groups. In this context, practices, hierarchies and rituals of authority often circumscribed the powers of central governance to the benefit of peasants and Brahmanical and commercial gentry; local community-based legal and social ordering was thus generally the norm, rather than unified state systems of law. The very processes of secondary state formation often reduced the authority of core imperial zones. Rulers often gave land grants to build loyal subordinates; this intensified (and often replaced cash payments) from the mid-first millennium CE, as overland trade routes were disrupted by nomadic migrations that affected South Asia as well as the Roman Empire. Some historians have compared this Indian decentralisation to the onset of feudalism in Europe; others see crucial differences, especially since structured serfdom was absent in most parts of India. There were also no Indian counterparts of the Church or of long-standing monarchic institutions as those in France, England, or the Holy Roman Empire. South Asian royal titles such as raja, cognate to Latin rex, were not monopolised by single kingly centres, but deployed at plural social levels. Claims of being Kshatriya, possessor of kshatra or regal authority, and of being Rajput, that is, literally, son of a raja, were widely used by martial-peasant communities to claim collective authority. From the thirteenth century, the Delhi Sultanate, an Indo-Islamic regime, introduced some fiscal, military, administrative and political centralisation across India, before falling apart around the mid-fourteenth century. The Turkic-origin

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Timurid or Mughal dynasty constructed a novel monarchising wave from the sixteenth century. They were aided by gunpowder and by buoyant oceanic trade, commercialisation and monetisation. New forms of sacred rulership emerged, grounded in administrative and military apparatuses partly paid in cash and allowing mobility to ambitious local lords, cutting across ethnic and sectarian affiliation.51

In early modern Europe, monotheistic monarchies were central to the development of modern ideas of state; the arguments of Schmitt and Kantorowicz have been noted above. Even in republican Switzerland, as Thomas Maissen has shown, monarchic vocabularies helped articulate notions of sovereignty.52 Recent researches have underlined the ways in which rulers in Mughal India, Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire and Tokugawa Japan conversed and contested with each other and/or with European monarchies to enunciate notions of sacred and messianic rulership, and sometimes even tried to enforce some measure of confessional unity, in order to support state construction. European colonialism in the Americas further globalised these ideologies. We can locate within this context the Mughal ruler Akbar’s quasimonotheistic and heterodox imperial cult in the late-sixteenth century, and the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh’s inclusionary monotheism and Emperor Aurangzeb’s strict interpretation of monotheistic Islam in the seventeenth century.53 In India, visions of sacred order served similar unifying functions as monotheism: rulers of Vijayanagara in southern India (between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries)54 and of regional polities like Jaipur (in the eighteenth century)55 patronised projects which synthesised Brahmanical-Sanskritic and popular devotional piety. The early modern period was, in many ways, an age of monotheistisation, since, as Alan Strathern notes, ‘the acceptance of monotheism could enhance the legitimacy of the elite, in the short as well as the long term’.56 It was also an age of globally-connected monarchisation.

Notions of messianic rulership and millenarianism have played a critical role in the emergence of modern ideas of individual and social progress as well. Historians have traced messianic themes in the European Renaissance and Reformation, in Iberian voyages of exploration and early colonialism and in the growth of English, American and French republicanism.57 In India, messianic paradigms helped articulate popular social ambitions, as in Bengali Vaishnavism from the sixteenth century,58 and legitimated anti-Mughal rebellions among the Sikhs and the Marathas from the late seventeenth century.59 South Asian

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messianisms thus brought peasants and pastoralists, merchants, artisans and scribal literati into the arenas of state politics and public spheres, through and against the sinews of imperial power structures: a trend that prefigured similar developments in the colonial era.

In the long aftermath of Mughal imperial crisis and decline, starting from the late-seventeenth century and stretching into the early-nineteenth, translocal state builders had to contest with a mosaic of local regimes. 60 Translocal divinities similarly shared space and competed with regional deities, often upheld by local lineages that governed, and were frequently enracinated in, martialpeasant communities. This co-existence predated the Mughals.61 Hermann Kulke’s observation about early medieval India can also be applied to the early modern era: ‘This territorial radiation of regional gods prompts comparison with the territorial sway of the medieval kings of India’s regional kingdoms. […] Furthermore, the hierarchy of gods also reflects the levels of government.’62 Within regional spaces, social and ideological heterogeneity, and the absence of any Church-like organization, bolstered cultic competition among deities arising from different social locations. Taking a cue from earlier historians and from precolonial Bengali texts, I would suggest that the incompleteness of Indic and Indo-Islamic imperial projects was related to the resilience of polyarchic religious beliefs in India. Decentralisation of governmental power in South Asia was connected to the polycentricity of celestial power in local belief, and the plurality of armed groups on earth was mirrored by the plurality of martial goddesses, gods and Indo-Islamic pirs (saintly figures often imbued with supernatural powers) in heaven.

Examples of such agonistic theologies can be found in the Bengali mangalakavyas, a textual and performative genre of devotional poetry,63 which often portrayed contestations of social-political hierarchies.64Annadamangal (1752), written by Bharatachandra, the court poet of a local Hindu ruler, Krishnachandra of Nadia, thus narrated how the Mughal ruler Jahangir suggested to an ancestor of Krishnachandra that Hindus (hindu) worshipped spirits (bhuta) and therefore had to be converted to Islam. The ancestor responded that Hindus and Muslims (musalman) alike worshipped a singular divinity (ishvara); he underlined that the formless (nirakara) divinity was made visible through form (sakara) and icon (murti). Simultaneously, his patron goddess assumed the Mughal ruler’s appearance, terrified Mughal forces and gave to her devotee royal authority.65 The text, emblematic of the Nadia court’s

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ideology, thus partially monotheistised Indic piety to address the challenge of Mughal Islam, while preserving the polyarchy of local deities. In another of Bharatachandra’s poems (composed in 1737–38), the Muslim faqir Satya Pir humbled an arrogant Brahmin who claimed that he did not ‘worship anyone other than Hari’, by revealing himself as the god Hari/Vishnu; God thus became a faqir ‘to make the yavana (here, Muslims) powerful’.66 Bharatachandra thus negotiated Islamic as well as Brahmanical and ‘Hindu’ triumphalist political theologies, legitimating and critiquing these multiple competing and intersecting founts of authority.

Such labouring through plural cosmologies also characterised Muslim authors in early modern Bengal who often conceptualised Allah through Sanskritic categories like brahman (divine absolute), niranjan (blameless), nirakara (formless), ishvara (lord) and dharma (sacred-moral order). Prophets like Yusuf ( Joseph) and Muhammad, as well as royal patrons, were described through Indic terms denoting the manifestation and embodiment of the divine, such as avatara (the one who has descended) and svarupa (form of the [divine] self ), and by reference to ramarajya (the idealised kingdom of god-king Rama) and to Indic gods.67 Additionally, Bengali writers, across sectarian frontiers, used Indic terms of divinity to eulogise Muslim rulers.68 The use of quasi-divine terms to define kings further indicates the relation between multi-scalar kingships, multi-scalar pantheons and incomplete monotheistisation. Daulat Qazi went further; he used a Sanskritic vocabulary to equate all human beings (nara) with divinity (ishvara) and with Islamic and Indic sacred texts and knowledge, as well as to question social differences between lords (thakura) and servants (kinkara).69 In early modern Bengal, sectarian borders, like political ones, remained porous. Centralising forces in Sanskritic and Indo-Islamic worlds had to contend with multi-directional ideological flows and with variegated imbrications of the divine and the political. British rule introduced an unprecedented political centralisation within this milieu. Historians have studied colonial ideologies of governance in detail, including debates on rulership, the enunciation of command-oriented authority and the quasi-kingly elevation of the Governors-General, presaging their final transformation into Viceroys.70 By the late-nineteenth century, the British monarchy became the ceremonial pinnacle of a neo-feudal statement of power in India, as emphasised by Bernard Cohn71 as well as by later researches into the political implications of imperial durbars and royal visits.72 Studies

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on princely states – parts of South Asia ruled by Indian princes, under British supervision – have emphasised intersections of imperial, nationalist and local communitarian projects in redefining rulerships.73

Meanwhile, partly inspired by the ‘invention of traditions’ paradigm associated with David Cannadine, Eric Hobsbawm and others,74 scholars have queried the nexus between monarchies and nation-construction in the latenineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century: examples include Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan and Thailand, with a later efflorescence in the Arab world and Iran. Cannadine treats the period between the 1870s and the First World War as a single unit for studying this invented royalism in Europe. He has offered the most paradigmatic and original interpretation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century as an era of royal state-construction.75 National elites often projected their monarchies as quasi-transcendental institutions that represented national unity, standing above class conflicts and factional or party differences. Sometimes, as the reign of Amanullah (r. 1919–29) in Afghanistan shows, a national kingship could achieve temporary popularity, but also divide social opinion and inhibit nation formation. When royally-led nation-building faltered, as in Italy or Germany, it arguably paved the way for dictatorial rulership. Monarchic state-building had imperial resonances. British, Habsburg and Japanese elites alike used monarchic institutions and symbols to nurture imperial unity, though their projects were contested by subject populations.76 Monarchy was often the pivot for organizing transcontinentally-spanned as well as locally reinforced hierarchies, as underlined by Cannadine for the British Empire.77 This complicity between monarchy and imperial hegemony lasted well beyond the mid-twentieth century. Thus, as Prasenjit Duara notes, the United States favoured ‘the model of modernizing client nation-states centered on royal identity in Asia, witness Japan, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others’.78 A latent monarchism could survive the demise of royal dynasties. Matthew Ellis traces continuities between interwar Arab monarchies in Egypt and Iraq and post-royal dictatorships in these countries.79 Scholars have similarly related early modern Anglo-European frameworks of (limited) monarchy to the quasi-monarchic powers of modern American Presidents.80 In case of India, Ronald Inden has shown how British and elite Indian ideas of kingship were conditioned by various colonial and nationalist policies of imagining the ideal state. I have taken a cue from Inden’s arguments about the relation between kingly discourses and shifting notions of sovereignty.

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Inden is especially acute in deconstructing the various monistic and pluralistic assumptions about state sovereignty that were carved out through British and Indian historiography regarding precolonial South Asian kingship.81 Mithi Mukherjee suggests that British-origin notions of the monarch as the source of justice and privileges overdetermined the quasi-Hobbesian make-up of the postcolonial Indian state: Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors functioned as ersatz monarchs. She concludes: ‘The grounding of the Indian Constitution on the category of justice as equity as its sovereign legislative principle throws up an extraordinary paradox: the constitution of a democratic polity is anchored in a monarchical principle of legislation.’82 Inden and Mukherjee concentrate on British and Indian (primarily Hindu) elites, analysing mainly Anglophone sources. A different emphasis, on the primacy of South Asian concepts to Indian state ideas, is given by Ananya Vajpeyi.83 Ayesha Jalal stresses the centrality of Indo-Islamic idioms to the constitution of new vocabularies of selfhood and sovereignty in colonial South Asia.84 Such varied intellectual history approaches have stimulated this book. At the level of practical politics, Pamela Price and Anastasia Piliavsky have explored continuities between older forms of kingship and postcolonial structures of patron-client relationship in India.85 For Thomas Blom Hansen, in contemporary India, not only the state, but also local ‘big men’, wield the power to kill, and are thus repositories of sovereign power.86 (Hansen, in conjunction with Finn Stepputat, has discussed the commonalities between kingships and modern forms of power across the world in terms of their orientation to exercising sovereignty in the form of violence, as the power over life and death.87) From a very different perspective, David Gilmartin has theorised about the manner in which the modern Indian voter has been imbued with an almost sacralised aura thanks to the spread of electoral politics and notions of popular sovereignty and public in the subcontinent: he has focused on Gandhi to analyse the asceticisation and (re-)enchantment of the individual which this entailed.88 I complement and historicise these political interrogations by showing how kingly and sacral models informed ideals of the nationalist political leader, and more broadly, of any political actor in modern South Asia, at a discursive level too, as the political activist was constituted in the image of a sovereign king (or queen), and the political arena was infiltrated with discourses on divine rulership across the late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century. Others have focused on subaltern languages of rulership. There are

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fascinating studies on popular messianic-millenarian politics in colonial India89 and in other colonial or racially segregated societies.90 For India, Shahid Amin’s analysis of peasant images of Gandhi, and Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri’s argument about the messianic transformation of ‘tribal’ politics in response to colonial state building, are paradigmatic. Scholars have also analysed South Asian ‘lower caste’ peasant claims to regality, though the focus has mainly been on political-social histories and not adequately on their intellectual ramifications. William Pinch’s study is exceptional in offering a rich description of peasant mentalities in colonial northern India.91 But an integrated approach connecting these different perspectives on political authority in modern India – elite and popular, European-colonial as well as indigenous peasant and ‘tribal’, local and transnational – largely remains to be constructed. Scholars interrogating elite visions have often remained in dissonance with those exploring ‘lower caste’ peasant imaginaries, while richly textured studies on particular regions and communities have been disconnected from transnationally-grounded theorisation. This is the research gap which I hope to address, drawing together disparate lines of enquiry which have been pursued in a disconnected manner in order to arrive at certain theoretical conceptualisations. While this book is indebted to previous generations of scholarly enquiry and tries its best to acknowledge its many sources of inspiration, its originality lies in empirical excavations, illuminating many rare and forgotten imaginaries about rulership at different social levels, as well as in methodological terms, in creating hitherto missing connections to arrive at broader philosophical generalisations. Such an integrated intellectual history study on rulership and political theology from the perspective of a colonised society (placed in its global context) has remained a desideratum. By (partly) addressing this gap, I hope to offer clues about the political theologies of colonialism and about the ways in which sovereignty can be decolonised and ‘de-elitised’, at least in certain conceptual senses.

III. Methodology This book interrogates how various concepts of Indic, Islamic and ChristianEuropean origin interacted in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century India and the often radically new valences they acquired in the specific politics of the colonial era. Ideas of empire and nation are studied in relation to shifting South

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Introduction 33

Asian idioms of politics and community. European grammars of kingship are focused upon in relation to South Asian vocabularies of raja, rajavamsha and kshatra/kshatriyatva or Islamic ideals of khilafat. I discuss European-origin monotheistic discourses as they were appropriated and destabilised by South Asians through citations of various Indic and Islamic structures of conceiving divinity. European-Christian ideas of messianism and divine incarnation are studied through their interplay with Indic and Islamic ideas, like avatara and Mahdi.92 I have underscored the malleable and porous nature of politicalepistemological categories in their historicity as they were made to converse and contest against each other by specific actors, highlighting the discourses forged through these intersections. Rather than offering fixed, transhistorical, or ‘transcendental’ definitions of terms such as raja, king, or God, I have highlighted the constructed nature of definitions that were produced by various agents for specific political purposes. I have followed what may be described as an ‘immanent’ methodology, based on analysing, through the following chapters and with the help of specific case studies, the building and destabilisation of semantic categories.

Intellectual history constitutes an exciting and raucous field of debate today. As far as modern South Asia is concerned, Shruti Kapila suggests that following initial pioneer contributions by Ranajit Guha and Eric Stokes, intellectual history underwent something of an eclipse, at least in part owing to the hegemonic ubiquity of social history writing.93 Yet, she underlines, the anti-colonial democratisation of Indian politics cannot be meaningfully explained unless one recognises the transformative impact of intellection.94 Historians have reached no consensus as to how this impact can be best analysed. Andrew Sartori has given importance to the global spread of capitalist processes of production and to the related racial and class tensions which provoked varied ideas of cultural selfhood, property rights and political resistance.95 For Christopher Bayly, Indian thinkers were globally oriented as they drew on multi-rooted ideologised conceptions and evolved hybridised idioms of public action.96 This entailed the production of ‘cosmopolitan thought zones’, as a book edited by Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra headlines it.97 Manjapra foregrounds the ‘non-teleological, contingent, historical’ modality of such formations.98 A common problem that these different approaches grapple with relates to the tensions between personal agency and macro-social trajectories, and, in methodological terms, between adopting a biographical approach towards

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studying subjectivities and stressing on economic, political and social forces that exceed individual lives. In negotiating this, my own thrust has been on uncovering certain argument structures and patterns rather than on offering comprehensive intellectual sketches of selected actors. Instead of illuminating the complex imaginaries of particular individuals, it is the diversity of discursive locations that has been stressed upon, though, in the process, contradictions and ‘schizophrenias’ within individual actors have also been noticed. Apart from texts, rituals, ceremonies and other activist practices (like acclamations) have also been interpreted as sites of intellectual work.

If we study the travels of concepts and models – here, those pertaining to human or divine rulership – then we obviously need to grapple with the question of what at all makes this travel possible. What impelled British or Indian actors to refer to rulerships in other spaces and times, and to make these references meaningful for their own political programmes? To speak about travel and connection is clearly not enough. As Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori have forcefully argued, it is important to study ‘not merely the channels that make mobility possible but also the social transformations that make specific intellectual practices and concepts plausible and meaningful across large spatial extensions’.99 I grapple with this challenge by foregrounding the concept of sovereignty across this book. From the perspective of this volume, it was the globally-entangled emergence of modern regimes of sovereign statehood – in imperial as well as national formats (and the many formats lying in between and in excess) – that enabled, and was in turn produced through, conceptual travels. Indian actors did not just cite Hobbes or the Japanese monarchy in a vacuum, or simply because they had read Hobbes or travelled to Japan or read newspaper reports. They did so because they had to wrestle with and against models of sovereign statehood; it was this which provoked their passionate interest in Hobbes or the Japanese monarchy. Acknowledging this, however, does not lead to teleological or unilinear historical narratives, least of all about ‘state formation’. As I hope to show in this book, ‘sovereignty’ was a malleable – and in many ways internally disruptive – category, one which existed as much through agonism, through polyvalence of interpretation, through the reign of inconsistency, as through hegemonic impositions of authoritative models. The debates I focus on in this book reveal how there was no one conceptual model of ‘sovereignty’ that ever became authoritative in modern India: just as there was no single face of ‘Hobbes’ that ever assumed monopoly of interpretation

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Introduction 35

among Indians. By focusing on debates, on vociferous and militant arguments, we can better underscore the conceptual fractures, the insoluble coming apart of thoughts, the disintegration and re-integration of worlds of meaning, which made conceptual travel possible. To state the obvious, conceptual travel does not imply the travel of a ‘thing’ from point A to point B. As Sebastian Conrad observes about the Enlightenment (while discussing its global ramifications) and as one can indeed generalise about any idea: ‘it is not an entity, a “thing” that was invented and then disseminated.’100 The advantages of connecting the emerging domains of South Asian intellectual history and global intellectual history are enormous. However, there are also risks involved. Moyn has cautioned against interpretative frames of ‘truncated universalism’, where the role of extra-European actors in global intellectual history becomes reduced to that of merely practically instantiating universalistic idioms – for example of rights and justice – which were first evolved by European actors.101 Sanjay Subrahmanyam has warned against intellectual histories that re-inscribe Eurocentric narratives while claiming to be purportedly ‘global’ in scope. He has emphasised the need for historians to give equitable importance to different local, transregional and global scales.102 The present volume responds to these recent debates that seek to intervene on the future contours of intellectual history writing. It studies different and overlapping spatio-temporal scales, narrating intellectual-political production that connected and cut across multiple social strata, temporalities and territorial borders.

The question of how to study temporal shifts in relation to conceptual transfers constitutes one of the methodological problems grappled with in this book. On the one hand, I eschew a ‘primordialist’ posture. It would be simplistic to see nineteenth/twentieth century intellection in South Asia in terms of encounters between polarised civilizational formations – ‘European/ Christian’, ‘Hindu/Indic’ and ‘Muslim’ – allegedly possessed of primordial, unchanging and mutually conflicting essences. When this volume uses such adjectival terms, it is always as a tentative and non-absolutist gesture, to underline, from actors’ or historians’ perspectives, the geographical embedding of concepts and practices in specific moments, rather than to assert that these are the possessions of particular ‘cultures’ for eternity. For example, when I speak about ‘Western’-origin notions of state sovereignty, constitutionalism or liberal-democratic politics, I do so in order to emphasise that the actors in

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question grappled with specific institutions, texts, or vocabularies which were indeed in part of European (or even more specifically, ‘seventeenth-century English’, etc.) provenance. But such notions were not constitutive of some fixed millennia-old ‘Western’ civilizational essence (such a notion of a unified Western civilization with a singular political trajectory is, to state the obvious, a myth), nor was there anything to prevent them from being re-authored by South Asian actors to resolve their own dilemmas. Similarly, ideas of avatara or jati may be, in one sense, of South Asian provenance, but they gained very new political meanings in colonial India which cannot be understood except in relation to their imbrications with concepts which originated at least in part outside South Asia. To study transborder discursive reticulations, to struggle with chains of intertwined signification that slide across frontiers and evade territorial policing, forms an important impulse for my work. Taken to an extreme, the spatially-bounded viewpoint of conceptual property might ultimately disregard the very historical and contingent acts of political actors in favour of a transcendent, and in my opinion mythical, notion of civilizational agency, where the role of actors would become reduced to that of carrying out the mandates of particular civilizations. It would ignore not only the historicity, and hence the ethical primacy, of actors’ agency and choice, but also the structural impact of colonial relations that cannot be boiled down to East-West encounter, but need to be seen, among other things, as embedded in variegated political, juridical, military, economic, social and of course discursive, power effects. Most importantly, such a primordialist frame would be unable to explain the ways in which the actors I study chose selectively, often in a bricolage style, from discursive repertoires of multiple origins, in order to pursue specific ends. To study what actors made out of the ideas they expropriated, how they often gave revolutionary new significations to older concepts, is often a more rewarding exercise than to attempt at perennially binding particular concepts to specific ‘cultural’ locales. There are also moral risks involved in provincialising concepts. To narrate history in terms of civilizational essences and clashes runs the risk of playing into dangerously fundamentalist political standpoints today, not the least in arenas of South Asian sectarian nationalisms. But we also need to avoid another extreme: that of arguing that the conceptual exercises of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century emerged ex nihilo, without any enracination in longer and denser intellectual genealogies. I think that it is the duty of transregional/transnational/global history to not only

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acknowledge spatial entanglements, but also temporal ones. David Armitage has recently advanced the notion of ‘transtemporal history’ to describe how older concepts are re-deployed and re-interpreted in novel historical contexts, thereby allowing scholars to track elements of change as well as constructed continuity.103 More controversially, in her understanding of the transtemporal, Rita Felski has emphasised affective, ‘postcritical’, engagements with texts which defy historicist divides.104 This volume pursues an empirically-grounded methodology of investigating how actors drew on concepts of older provenance, even as they refashioned them into contemporaneous tools of sense-making. I emphasise transversals, examining how mobile concepts cut across various spatial and temporal frontiers as they were deployed by actors to produce innovative and expansive horizons of thinking, as well as new identitarian borders.

At least as long as the capital of British Bengal, Calcutta, was also the capital of British India, that is, till 1911, Bengal was the political-cultural core of colonial power in the subcontinent, a site of intense encounter between Anglo-European structures of ideological, economic and administrative power, and South Asian ones. Western-educated Bengalis played a leading role in the emergence of early Indian reform movements and nationalism, while conversing with nationalists from other parts of South Asia. The deprivation faced by peasants in Bengal and the forms of conceptual resistance to which they resorted, often resembled that of peasant communities in other parts of India, despite differences in property and fiscal structures. I have therefore drawn many of my examples from Bengal, while deliberately connecting them to those drawn from other parts of India, emphasising the need for sensitivity to connections and dissonances between diverse scales of analysis.

British as well as South Asian actors frequently related themselves to political and conceptual forms outside the geographic borders of British India. The modern global spread of the format of the sovereign state provides one rationale for negotiating a ‘global intellectual history’ point of view. After all, the different actors whom I study were all responding to the construction of regimes of sovereign statehood in South Asia. A spatially bordered frame of analysis (bound to homogenised constructions of ‘Bengal’ or ‘India’) would not do justice to their projects. Simultaneously, the differentiated nature of their perspectives also demands attention. A homogenised rendition of the ‘global’ would lead us to a terrain as deceptive as that of a provincialised construction of the ‘national’. Finally, in so far as the Indian actors are concerned, many of

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them related localised struggles to transnational horizons in order to build political idioms that defy easy categorisation along local/global binaries. Perhaps one could think of them as producers of a subaltern global, as agents who built globalised vocabularies from an enforced position of subjugation and territorialisation, while labouring at re-shaping the world they inhabited. This book pays specific attention to their thoughts which remain as provocative in our own times as in theirs.

Endnote 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8

‘Rail Blockade at New Cooch Behar Lifted: Protesters Want the District to be Recognised as ‘Category C’ State or a UT’, in The Hindu, 23 February 2016, available at:  http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/rail–blockade–at–new–cooch– behar–lifted/article8272634.ece, accessed on 24 September 2016.

Shiv Sahay Singh, ‘BSF Denies Training ‘Army’ of Cooch Behar King’, in The Hindu, 27 August 2016, available at: http://www.thehindu.com/todays–paper/tp–national/ tp–otherstates/bsf–denies–training–army–of–cooch–behar–king/article9038197.ece, accessed on 24 September 2016; Prabir Kundu, ‘Bhuyo Rajbarite Ajab Rajyapat’, in Ei Samay, 6 September 2016, 1 and 10. Aniruddha Ghosal, ‘Cooch Behar: A ‘King’ with No Kingdom Dreams of an ‘Independent State’ to Rule’, in The Indian Express, 4 May 2016, available at: http:// indianexpress.com/article/kolkata/west–bengal–elections–cooch–behar–a–king– with–no–kingdom–dreams–of–an–independent–state–to–rule–2783372/, accessed on 24 September 2016.

According to the 2001 Census, they constitute 18.4 per cent of West Bengal’s Scheduled Caste population, followed by Namashudras (17.4 per cent), available at: http://censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/dh_sc_westbengal.pdf, accessed on 13 February 2014. Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivaran, 1918, 50–52. For further details, see Chapter 4. Panchanan Barma (1866–1935) was born in a peasantorigin family in Cooch Behar, joined the legal profession, and was the most important founder–leader of the Kshatriya Samiti, the mouthpiece of interwar Rajavamshi politics. He was repeatedly elected as a member of the Bengal Legislative Council (in 1921, 1923, and 1929–30).

I borrow the term from Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon’, in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 189–200. I draw the phrase from Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher (eds.), The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic, London: Continuum, 2010, though my concerns are different. It is impossible to summarise the vast scholarship here. See, as a representative and influential spectrum of voices, John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings,

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Introduction 39 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914; Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963 (1936); Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996 (1938); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 3: Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Shruti Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 270.

10 See, for example, the discussions in Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (eds.), Political Theology and Early Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 11 See, for example, Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Véronique Béneï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

12 Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai–Ahom in India, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 13 See above, as well as discussions later in this book, and especially Chapter 4.

14 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘sovereign, n. and adj.’, OED Online, June 2016, Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oed.com.ubproxy.ub.uni–heidelberg.de/ view/Entry/185332?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=n090c3&, accessed on 30 June 2016.

15 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘sovereignty, n.’, OED Online, June 2016, Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oed.com.ubproxy.ub.uni–heidelberg.de/ view/Entry/185343?redirectedFrom=sovereignty, accessed on 30 June 2016.

16 Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Paris : Jacques du Puys, 1577, 222 ; Jean Bodin, De Republica Libri Sex, Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1586, 210; Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, translated by Richard Knolles, London: Impensis G. Bishop, 1606, 222. 17 On concept–histories of sovereignty, see, for example, ‘Staat und Souveränität’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 6, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1990, 1–154; Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Dieter Grimm, Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 18 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘monism, n.’, OED Online, June 2016, Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oed.com.ubproxy.ub.uni–heidelberg.de/view/Entry/1 21244?redirectedFrom=monism, accessed on 2 July 2016.

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19 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985 (1922, 1934), 36; also Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008 (1970). 20 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. 21 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and its Late Mediaeval Origins’, in Selected Studies, New York: J. J. Augustin, 1965, 398. 22 Alfred Lyall (1835–1911) was a British administrator who rose to the post of Lieutenant–Governor of the North–Western Provinces (1881–87). 23 Alfred C. Lyall, ‘Government of the Indian Empire’, The Edinburgh Review, January 1884: 3. 24 Ibid., 34; see also Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982 (1959), 321–22. My discussion on Lyall here draws substantially on Stokes. 25 Lyall, ‘Government of the Indian Empire’, 2. 26 Ibid., 31; ‘ryot’ was a generic term (adopted from previous Indo–Islamic regimes) used by the colonial state in India to refer to several types of peasants. 27 Eusebius’ Theophania, quoted by Alfred C. Lyall, Asiatic Studies: Religious and Social, London: John Murray, 1884, 297. 28 Lyall, Asiatic Studies, 298–300. 29 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, ‘Svapnalabdha Bharatavarsher Itihasa’ (1875, 1895), in Bhudevarachanasambhara, Calcutta: Mitra o Ghosh, 1957, 342–43. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–94) was a Bengali litterateur. 30 Ibid., 346–55, 363. 31 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, ‘Samajika Pravandha’ (1892), in Bhudevarachanasambhara, 116–20, 131–33. 32 Daily Hitavadi, 9 January 1906, extract in Report on the Native Newspapers of Bengal (hereafter RNPB). 33 Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) was an ‘Extremist’ Indian politician and intellectual, and was associated with revolutionary militancy in the 1900s. Later, in interwar years, he became a religious guru. 34 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Ideal of Human Unity’ (first published 1915–19, then revised in the late 1930s and again in 1949, with the revised edition published in 1950), in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 25, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997, 450. 35 Ibid.,293–94. 36 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 23–24. 37 Kazi Nazrul Islam, ‘Manush’, in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 2, Calcutta: Pashchimvanga Bangla Akademi, 2005, 76. Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976) was a nationalist litterateur from Bengal, acknowledged today as the national poet of Bangladesh. Kalki is the messianic tenth and final incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu; the Mahdi is the Islamic saviour who will defeat the forces of evil in the end–time.

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Introduction 41

38 Erik Peterson, ‘Monotheism as a Political Problem: A Contribution to the History of Political Theology in the Roman Empire’, in Theological Tractates, edited and translated by Michael J. Hollerich, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 68–105.

39 Ranajit Guha, ‘A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India’, in The Small Voice of History, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009, 479–92 (quote from 491). Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94) was a nationalist thinker and novelist from Bengal, who was late nineteenth century India’s most famous litterateur. See also Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World–History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 40 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign.

41 Alexei Yurchak, ‘Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty’, Representations, 129(1) 2015: 116–57. 42 Martel, Subverting the Leviathan; James R. Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.

43 See, for example: Georgina Green, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 44 C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

45 Georges Dumézil, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus III: Naissance d’Archanges, Essai sur la Formation de la Théologie Zoroastrienne, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, 136–56  ; Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Epopée, vol. 2, Types Epiques Indo–Européens: Un Héros, Un Sorcier, Un Roi, Paris: Gallimard, 1971, 7–9; Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

46 Michael Witzel, ‘Early Sanskritization: Origins and Development of the Kuru State’, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 1(4) 1995: 1–26; Michael Witzel, ‘Rgvedic History: Poets, Chieftains and Polities’, in The Indo–Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture, and Ethnicity, edited by George Erdosy, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995, 307–52; Geoffrey Samuel, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 47 Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001; David H. Sick, ‘When Socrates met the Buddha: Greek and Indian Dialectic in Hellenistic Bactria and India’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 17(3) 2007: 253–78; Alf Hiltebeitel, Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

48 Aziz Al–Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities, London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1997; Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999; Aziz Al–Azmeh and Janos M. Bak (eds.), Monotheistic Kingship: The Medieval Variants, Budapest: Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2004; Matthew P. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009;

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The Mortal God Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen (eds.), One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

49 J. Michael McKnight, ‘Kingship and Religion in the Gupta Age’, McMaster University PhD Dissertation, 1976; Michael Willis, The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 50 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 277–79.

51 D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1956; R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, c. 300–1200, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1965; Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980; J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985; David Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Surajit Sinha (ed.), Tribal Polities and State Systems in Pre–Colonial Eastern and North Eastern India, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1987; Burton Stein, Vijayanagara, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989; Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (1990); Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge Universe Press, 1993; Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; Kumkum Roy, The Emergence of Monarchy in North India: Eighth–Fourth Centuries BC, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; H. Kulke (ed.), The State In India, 1000–1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Mughal State, 1526–1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; R. S. Sharma, Early Medieval Indian Society: A Study in Feudalisation, Calcutta: Orient Longman, 2003; Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, London: Penguin, 2003; Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, India 1200–1800, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2004; Blain H. Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate, London: I. B. Tauris, 2012; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012; Audrey Truschke, ‘Cosmopolitan Encounters: Sanskrit and Persian at the Mughal Court’, Columbia University PhD Dissertation, 2012. 52 Thomas Maissen, ‘Inventing the Sovereign Republic: Imperial Structures, French Challenges, Dutch Models, and the Early Modern Swiss Confederation’, in The

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Introduction 43 Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared, edited by André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen and Maarten Prak, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008, 125–50.

53 Cornell H. Fleischer, ‘The Lawgiver as Messiah : The Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleyman’ in Soliman le Magnifique et son Temps, edited by Gilles Veinstein, Paris: La Documentation Française, 1992, 159–78; Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500 – c. 1800, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995; Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Turning the Stones Over: Sixteenth– century Millenarianism from the Tagus to the Ganges’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 40(2) 2003: 129–61; Kiri Paramore, Ideology and Christianity in Japan, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009; Rajeev Kinra, ‘Infantilizing Baba Dara: The Cultural Memory of Dara Shekuh and the Mughal Public Sphere’, Journal of Persianate Studies 2(2) 2009: 165–93; Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012; Kaya Sahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Suleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth–Century Ottoman World, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 54 Cezary Galewicz, A Commentator in Service of the Empire: Sayana and the Royal Project of Commenting on the Whole of the Veda, Vienna: Sammlung de Nobili, University of Vienna, 2010. On Sanskritic philosophical unification, see also Andrew J. Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 55 Monika Horstmann, ‘Theology and Statecraft’, in Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives, edited by Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, London: Routledge, 2011, 75–104. 56 Alan Strathern, ‘Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49(2) 2007: 358–83; quote from 364. Strathern suggests that Buddhism and strands of Hinduism successfully competed against monotheistic religions and encouraged political rejection of monotheism by offering alternate visions of unifying moral order.

57 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949; Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London: Secker and Warburg, 1957; Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970; John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970; Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975; J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes

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The Mortal God in American Thought, 1756–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth–Century Spain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Arthur H. Williamson, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World, Westport: Praeger, 2008.

58 Two important primary sources for these messianic themes are Vrndavana Dasa, Chaitanyabhagavata edited by Sukumar Sen, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2003; Krishnadasa Kaviraja, Chaitanyacharitamrta, edited by Sukumar Sen and Tarapada Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995. See also Amiya P. Sen, ‘Bhakti Paradigms, Syncretism and Social Restructuring in Kaliyuga: A Reappraisal of Some Aspects of Bengali Religious Culture’, Studies in History 14(1) 1998: 89–126. 59 Louis E. Fenech, The Darbar of the Sikh Gurus: The Court of God in the World of Men, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008; Robin Rinehart, Debating the Dasam Granth, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; Kavindra Paramananda, Sivabharata: The Epic of Shivaji, edited and translated by James W. Laine and S. S. Bahulkar, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001; James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Messianic elements in Sikh discourses are comparatively well recognised. Less well known is the fact that Maratha-oriented discourses of the late–seventeenth and eighteenth century also projected the Maratha ruler Shivaji as an avatara–like messianic king; see, for example, the court epic Sivabharata. On the messianic Shivaji in contemporaneous Hindi literature, see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 191–92.

60 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707– 48, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Tilottama Mukherjee, Political Culture and Economy in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: Networks of Exchange, Consumption and Communication, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2013. 61 On the politics of these local cults, see Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke and Gaya Charan Tripathi (eds.), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, Delhi: Manohar, 1978; Hermann Kulke, Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia, Delhi: Manohar, 1993; Hermann Kulke and Burkhard Schnepel (eds.), Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and the State in Orissa, Delhi: Manohar, 2001; Burkhard Schnepel, The Jungle Kings: Ethnohistorical Aspects of Politics and Ritual in Orissa, Delhi: Manohar, 2002; Pika Ghosh, ‘Tales, Tanks, and Temples: The Creation of a Sacred Center in Seventeenth–Century Bengal’, Asian Folklore Studies 61(2) 2002: 193–222; Hugh B. Urban, ‘Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship, and Sacrifice in the Worship of Mother

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Introduction 45 Goddess Kamakhya’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31(3) 2008: 500–34; Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Cultural Flows and Cosmopolitanism in Mughal India: The Bishnupur Kingdom’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46(2) 2009: 147–82; Samuel Wright, ‘From Prasasti to Political Culture: The Nadia Raj and Malla Dynasty in Seventeenth-Century Bengal’, The Journal of Asian Studies 73(2) 2014: 397–418.

62 Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, London: Routledge, 1998, 136–37. 63 Asutosh Bhattacharyya, Bangla Mangalakavyer Itihasa, Calcutta: A. Mukherjee and Co., 2009 (1939); David L. Curley, Poetry and History: Bengali Mangal–kabya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal, Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008; and ‘The “World of the Text” and Political Thought in Bengali Mangal–kavya, c. 1500–1750’, The Medieval History Journal 14(2) 2011: 183–211. 64 Milinda Banerjee, ‘State of Nature, Civilized Society, and Social Contract: Perspectives from Early Modern Bengal on the Origin and Limits of Government’, Calcutta Historical Journal 28(2) 2008: 1–55.

65 Bharatachandra, ‘Annadamangala’, in Bharatachandra–Granthavali, Calcutta: Bangiya–Sahitya–Parishat, 2013, 375–402; Curley, Poetry and History, 198–238; Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth–Century Bengal’, The Journal of Asian Studies 67(2) 2008: 513–43; Ratan Dasgupta, ‘Maharaja Krishnachandra: Religion, Caste and Polity in Eighteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Historical Review 38(2) 2011: 225– 42; Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 47(2) 2013: 1–53; Joel Bordeaux, ‘The Mythic King: Raja Krishnacandra and Early Modern Bengal’, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2015.

66 Bharatachandra, ‘Satyanarayaner Bratakatha’, in Bharatachandra–Granthavali, 491– 92. On the cult, see Tony K. Stewart, ‘Alternate Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal’, in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000, 21–54.

67 As representative sources, see Shah Muhammad Sagir, Yusuf Zulaikha (dated between the fifteenth and the early–seventeenth century), Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 1999; Daulat Qazi, Lorchandrani o Satimayna (1630s), Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2012; and Alaol, Padmavati (mid–seventeenth century), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 2002. Another important text, Saiyad Sultan’s Nabivamsha (early–mid seventeenth century), is analysed in Ayesha A. Irani, ‘Sacred Biography, Translation, and Conversion: The Nabivamsa of Saiyad Sultan and the Making of Bengali Islam, 1600–Present’, PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2011. Irani also refers to Richard Eaton, Tony Stewart and Asim Roy, while discussing terminological movements.

68 Muhammad Enamul Huq, Muslim Bangla–Sahitya, Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2001, 30, 32, 44, 47, 83–85. 69 Daulat Qazi, Lorchandrani, 10.

70 Stokes, English Utilitarians; C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the

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The Mortal God World, 1780–1830, Harlow: Pearson Education, 1989; Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006; Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

71 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (1983), 165–209.

72 R. E. Frykenberg, ‘The Coronation Durbar of 1911: Some Implications’, in Delhi through the Ages, edited by R. E. Frykenberg, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986, 369–90; Alan Trevithick, ‘Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi: 1877–1911’, Modern Asian Studies 24(3) 1990: 561–78; Douglas E. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, 230–56; Chandrika Kaul, ‘Monarchical Display and the Politics of Empire: Princes of Wales and India 1870–1920s’, Twentieth Century British History 17(4) 2006: 464–88; H. Hazel Hahn, ‘Indian Princes, Dancing Girls and Tigers: The Prince of Wales’s Tour of India and Ceylon, 1875–1876’, Postcolonial Studies 12(2) 2009: 173–92; Luke McKernan, ‘“The Modern Elixir of Life”: Kinemacolor, Royalty and the Delhi Durbar’, Film History 21(2) 2009: 122–36; Hilary Sapire, ‘Ambiguities of Loyalism: The Prince of Wales in India and Africa, 1921–2 and 25’, History Workshop Journal 73(1) 2012: 37–65; Julie F. Codell (ed.), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars, Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2012; Chandrika Kaul, Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 19–70. 73 For historiographic overviews: Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Fiona Groenhout, ‘The History of the Indian Princely States: Bringing the Puppets Back onto Centre Stage’, History Compass 4(4) 2006: 629–44; Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Re–visioning Princely States in South Asian Historiography: A Review’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46(3) 2009: 301–13. A broader bibliography is given in Chapter 2. 74 Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds.), Invention of Tradition.

75 David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820–1977’, in ibid.,101–64.

76 On Britain: Edward Shils and Michael Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, The Sociological Review 1(2) 1953: 63–81; William M. Kuhn, Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914, London: Macmillan, 1996; Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; David M. Craig, ‘The Crowned Republic? Monarchy and Anti– Monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901’, The Historical Journal 46(1) 2003: 167–85; Andrzej Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. On the British Empire: Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Invention of Tradition, edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger, 211–62; Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes, Chicago:

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47

Chicago University Press, 1998; Philip Buckner, ‘The Royal Tour of 1901 and the Construction of an Imperial Identity in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 41(1) 1999: 324–48; Andrew Apter, ‘The Subvention of Tradition: A Genealogy of the Nigerian Durbar’, in State/Culture: State–Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by George Steinmetz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, 213–52; James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001; James Loughlin, The British Monarchy and Ireland: 1800 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Peter Boyce, The Queen’s Other Realms: The Crown and its Legacy in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, Sydney: Federation Press, 2008. On Italy: Catherine Brice, Monarchie et identité nationale en Italie (1861–1900), Paris: Editions de  l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2010; Christopher Duggan, ‘Francesco Crispi, the Problem of the Monarchy, and the Origins of Italian Nationalism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15(3) 2010: 336–53. On Germany: John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Frank Lorenz Müller, Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. On the Habsburg Empire, Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848– 1916, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005; Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky (eds.), The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. On Japan and its empire: Herbert P. Bix, ‘Rethinking “Emperor–System Fascism”: Ruptures and Continuities in Modern Japanese History’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14(2) 1982: 2–19; Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004; Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. On Thailand: Eiji Murashima, ‘The Origin of Modern Official State Ideology in Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 19(1) 1988: 80–96; Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002; Jack Fong, ‘Sacred Nationalism: The Thai Monarchy and Primordial Nation Construction’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 39(4) 2009: 673–96. On Iran: Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. On the Arab world: Joseph Kostiner (ed.), Middle East Monarchies: The Challenge of Modernity, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000; Matthew H. Ellis, ‘King Me: The Political Culture of Monarchy in Interwar Egypt and Iraq’, MPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005; Elie Podeh, ‘The Bay’a: Modern Political Uses of Islamic Ritual in the Arab World’, Die Welt des Islams 50(1) 2010: 117–52. On Afghanistan: Asta Olesen, Islam and Politics in Afghanistan, London: Routledge, 1995; Jawan Shir, ‘Nationalism in Afghanistan:

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48

The Mortal God Colonial Knowledge, Education, Symbols, and the Junket Tour of Amanullah Khan, 1901–1929’, MA Dissertation, James Madison University, 2012.

77 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, London: Penguin, 2001. 78 Prasenjit Duara, ‘The New Imperialism and the Post–Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in Comparative Perspective’, The Asia–Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 4(1) 4 January 2006, available at: http://www.japanfocus.org/–Prasenjit–Duara/1715/ article.html, accessed on 7 June 2015. 79 Ellis, ‘King Me’, 104–5.

80 Clement Fatovic, Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009; William E. Scheuerman, ‘American Kingship? Monarchical Origins of Modern Presidentialism’, Polity 37(1) 2005: 24–53. 81 Ronald Inden, Imagining India, London: Hurst and Co., 2000, 162–212.

82 Mithi Mukherjee, India in the Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History, 1774–1950, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010; quote from 192. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the Indian nationalist politician, became the first Prime Minister of postcolonial India. 83 Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

84 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850, London: Routledge, 2000.

85 Pamela G. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Anastasia Piliavsky (ed.), Patronage as Politics in South Asia, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

86 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India’, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 169–91; Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘The Political Theology of Violence in Contemporary India’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2, 2008, available at: http://samaj.revues.org/1872, accessed on 30 June 2016.

87 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Introduction’, in Sovereign Bodies, edited by Hansen and Stepputat, 1–38; Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 2006: 295–315. 88 David Gilmartin, ‘Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual’, Religions 3(2) 2012: 407–23; David Gilmartin, ‘Rethinking the Public through the Lens of Sovereignty’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38(3) 2015: 371–86.

89 Stephen Fuchs, Rebellious Prophets: A Study of Messianic Movements in Indian Religions, London: Asia Publishing House, 1965; K. S. Singh, Birsa Munda and His Movement, 1874–1901: A Study of a Millenarian Movement in Chotanagpur, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1983; Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 3, edited by Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 (1984), 1–61; Gautam Bhadra, Iman o Nishan: Unish Shataker Banglar Krishak Chaitanyer ek Adhyay, c. 1800–1850, Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1994;

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Introduction 49 Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, ‘Revaluation of Tradition in the Ideology of the Radical Adivasi Resistance in Colonial Eastern India, 1855–1932 – Part I’, Indian Historical Review 36(2) 2009: 273–305, and Part II Indian Historical Review 37(1) 2010: 39–62.

90 Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957; Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979; G. W. Trompf (ed.), Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994; Todd A. Diacon, Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912–1916, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002; Maitrii Aung–Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.

91 William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. I offer a more detailed bibliography in Chapter 4.

92 For discussions on some of these concepts, see ‘Monarchie’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 4, Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1978, 133–214; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008 (1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2006 (1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Rahul Peter Das, ‘Little Kingdoms and Big Theories of History’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 117(1) 1997: 127–34; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001; Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c. 1867–1905, Leiden: Brill, 2009. See the introduction of Mitchell and van Nuffelen (eds.), One God, for debates about monotheism as a category. 93 Shruti Kapila, ‘Preface and Acknowledgments’, in An Intellectual History for India, edited by Shruti Kapila, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2010, v–viii. 94 Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History’.

95 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; Andrew Sartori, ‘Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy’, in Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 110–33; Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. 96 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

97 Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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98 Kris Manjapra, ‘Transnational Approaches to Global History: A View from the Study of German–Indian Entanglement’, German History 32(2) 2014: 293.

99 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, ‘Approaches to Global Intellectual History’, in Global Intellectual History, edited by Moyn and Sartori, 24.

100 Sebastian Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique’, The American Historical Review 117(4) 2012: 1001. 101 Samuel Moyn, ‘On the Nonglobalization of Ideas’, in Global Intellectual History, edited by Moyn and Sartori, 187–204.

102 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Global Intellectual History beyond Hegel and Marx’, History and Theory 54(1) 2015: 126–37.

103 David Armitage, ‘What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée’, History of European Ideas 38(4) 2012: 493–507. 104 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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1 ‘Caesar of India’

Debating the British Monarchy and Colonial Rulership 1.1 Introduction This chapter focuses on the ways in which British colonial administrators, politicians and intellectuals used concepts and rituals of singular rulership, and especially those associated with the British monarchy, to justify the construction of a modern order of state sovereignty in India. It also highlights British voices which were sceptical towards authoritarian articulations of colonial rule, and, in a more elaborate manner, underlines Indian appropriation and subversion of British monarchic rhetoric and ceremonial. The aim is to demonstrate the variety of strategies through which colonial rulership was vociferously debated by British as well as Indian actors, with a constitutive impact on the emergence of transnationally-spanned spaces of political thinking.

British imperial ideologies, as they emerged in South Asia following the formal assumption of the government of India by the Crown in 1858, were part of broader flows of ideas and information about monarchic rule. Colonial administrators and thinkers cited models of rulership within the wider British Empire, as well as in the Habsburg Empire, France during the Second Empire, Imperial Germany, Savoyard Italy, Romanov Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Afghanistan, to articulate their own visions of sovereignty. The Indian experience of colonial rulership resulted in parliamentary debates and influenced British intellectuals and litterateurs as they re-imagined ideas of governance amidst social tensions in an industrialising world. New and globally-oriented visions of improvement, civilization, modernity and progress were often advocated by the British through the language of singular rulership. Monistic command-oriented authority, symbolised through the British monarchy, was championed by some colonial administrators and politicians as a way of efficiently bringing modernity into India in line with global changes, ending the stagnation and fragmentation supposedly inherent in a backward society. Singular rulership stood here as the ceremonial face of a transcendental idea of progress rationally ordering a ‘primitive’ world.

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Others however affirmed more conservative (rather than purely progressoriented) articulations of monarchic rule. Colonial practices of property ownership and fiscal extraction, as well as regimes of law, were also often expressed through monarchic imaginaries. Certain colonial administrators saw kingship as an instrument to translate governance for Orientals who supposedly could not understand the ‘abstractions’ of state authority unless they saw it in a ‘personal’ form. And finally, many British administrators as well as (often, Liberal) parliamentarians strongly criticised the authoritarian aspects of monarchic rhetoric: a strand of imperial thinking which, in the long run, contributed to a self-conscious diminution of tropes of despotic authority, in tandem with greater devolution of political powers to Indians. In the end, the British monarchy offered a contested, rather than homogenous and consensual, locus for political discussion. It was similar on the Indian side. Some Indians vernacularised the British monarchy to voice their personal or national hopes and ambitions; this included social elites, middle classes, as well as peasant actors. But the instantiations of the British monarchy in colonial society created a long-term crisis that was reflected in public sphere debates from the 1870s to the 1930s. While Indian public and private funds financed colonial royal celebrations, the middle and lower classes got little opportunity to present their grievances before visiting British royals or to have their complaints redressed on ceremonial occasions. Many Indians therefore critiqued the British monarchy as a fake kingship that masked Britain’s impersonal and institutionalised exploitation of Indians. They used the universalistic and welfare-oriented rhetoric of imperial kingship to denounce the empirical reality of racial chauvinism and fiscal oppression. British kingship was unmasked as a staged sovereignty, a performance of monism which barely disguised more complex assemblages of economic and social governance. Subverting colonial rhetoric, Indian nationalists often celebrated ‘personal’ rule to denounce the systemic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers. Liberal-republican critiques of British authoritarianism also emerged in Indian discourses as a reaction to colonial monarchism.

1.2 A crisis of rulership? From ‘connected revolutions’ to an imperial monarchy, ca. 1700–1858 The South Asia within which British power began to achieve political dominance from the mid-eighteenth century had been characterised in the

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previous decades by an ascendancy of decentralising forces which were rooted in long-term socio-economic, ecological, political and cultural-religious factors, as well as in more immediate anti-Mughal rebellions that had erupted since the late-seventeenth century. In this milieu of political flux, and in a large measure to justify opposition to Mughal rule, Maratha1 and Sikh politics2 had evolved sophisticated discourses on rulership, its limits, and the ‘right’ of ‘righteous’ rebellion if rulers transgressed moral-political boundaries. Even in Bengal, which had carved out its regional political autonomy (over the first half of the eighteenth century) without any outright anti-Mughal militancy, there existed discourses about the duties of rulers and the limits of rulership as well as about the possibility of removing unjust rulers if they violated the lives, faith, or property of their subjects or threatened the security of women. Many of these texts were composed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and were either orally performed in front of audiences comprising literate and non-literate groups, or had a more restricted circulation among literate gentry; these drew upon older Indic and Islamic traditions.3 As various historians have shown in considerable detail, early modern Europeans were divided in their assessment of Indian political traditions. Some regarded India as a land of oriental despotism (as part of a wider Islamicruled Orient). Others suggested that India had an ancient Hindu or Mughal constitution which needed regeneration.4 Sections of British elites feared that following the British conquest of Bengal, India-returned Britons would corrupt the British polity itself, introducing the feared evils of Asiatic despotism into the interior of Europe.5 Prominent among the critical voices, Edmund Burke suggested that Indian regimes had traditionally been characterised by various checks and balances, but British adventurers like Warren Hastings had endangered these, with resultant negative implications also for Britain.6 In a comparable vein, the French Anquetil-Duperron suggested that the British were negating forms of legal rule which had characterised India earlier,7 a perspective with which some Germans also agreed.8 Of course only select sections of European public opinion were deeply engaged with Indian politics and history, and only some Indians had substantive exposure to Western politics and ideology. Nevertheless, there were possibilities of conversation about rulership and its limits in contact zones like Bengal, whose early-mid-eighteenth century polity offered an open theatre of conflict and alliance between Mughal-origin administrative gentry, local landed magnates and various banking and commercial interests. In 1756, a coalition Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.002

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of some of these actors tried to replace the Bengal ruler Sirajuddaulah with Shaukat Jang; when this failed, the rebels allied with the British, with greater success, and ensured Sirajuddaulah’s deposition. In reflecting on the agency of Indians in changing their rulers, Jean Law, head of the French lodge at Cossimbazar in Bengal, observed a kind of ‘révolution’ in which the banking house of Jagat Seths had a principal role (‘la première cause de toutes les révolutions dans le Bengale’; ‘la vraie cause de la révolution’).9 Modern historians agree with this assessment of the kingmaking role of South Asian banking-commercial groups, though the British would later drastically curtail their power.10

A broader lesson was drawn by ‘Nota Manus’, the Creole translator of a contemporaneous Persian-language history. He suggested that Indians, like the historian Syed Gholam Hossein Khan, believed ‘that submission in the subject, and an intense religious regard to distributive justice in the Ruler, are terms correlative; and that the one cannot exist, where the other ceases to be.’11 The translator commented on the fact that the Indians had planned to enthrone Shaukat Jang only if he agreed to rule ‘under certain conditions and stipulations’, ‘mentioned at length’ in a letter given to him. He suggested: ‘This is the first instance, probably, in the East, where people submitting to a Monarch, thought of tying him down to certain conditions and stipulations.’12 The translator’s awareness of the writings of Hobbes, James Harrington, Voltaire and William Blackstone13 perhaps sensitised him to South Asian ideas about accountability of rulers to the ruled. He concluded that the British should look after the interests of Indians if they wished to prevent sedition.14 Interestingly, Bengali treatises composed in the 1800s also reflected on the events of 1756–57 by working through Indic concepts of limited rulership and the ethics of revolt. Written under colonial tutelage, the texts blackened Sirajuddaulah and praised the British; however tendentious, they reveal encounters and parallels between Indian and European notions of ‘just’ rule.15 Voltaire drew on this context of Indian political agency to question the supposed ubiquity of despotism in the Orient. He compared the Marathas to the Swiss: hardy, courageous and liberty-loving hill-people who selected, and often disobeyed, their chiefs, though Europeans wrongly regarded these chiefs as kings.16 He praised the lack of serfdom in India and the enjoyment of secure property rights by different Indian communities. Within this broader frame, he saw in the anti-Mughal rebellions ‘a new revolution’, where ‘the people of the interior dethroned the Sovereign’, demonstrating that ‘the so-called

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despotism had never existed. The Emperor was not powerful enough even to make a small ruler obey him.’17

Christopher Bayly has observed that the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed challenges to monarchies across various parts of Asia and Europe.18 Indeed, recent scholarship has highlighted the ‘global’ context of the age of revolutions.19 Such perspectives help us to understand South Asian – including Bengali, Maratha and Sikh – reflections on rulership and revolt, as well as European commentaries – such as by Jean Law, Nota Manus and Voltaire – which emphasised Indian agency in regime change and ‘revolution’. I would argue that intellectually, as much as in terms of the social and political rise of intermediate groups (gentrifying peasants and pastoralists, administrative-scribal literati, merchants and artisans), various strands of lateseventeenth and eighteenth century Indian history can be squarely located within a global context of monarchic crisis and revolution, and compared to the better known historical transformations of Britain, France and the Americas.

Though the British utilised this ‘revolutionary’ polycentricity in South Asia to establish their empire, they also sought to replace it with a more monocentric state system. The production of a language of monarchic ‘despotism’ was one aspect of this trajectory. Such idioms were not absent in Europe either. For example, Blackstone famously argued that the British Parliament had ‘sovereign and uncontroulable [sic] authority’ and was ‘the place where that absolute despotic power, which must in all governments reside somewhere, is intrusted by the constitution of these kingdoms’.20 Taking a cue from Giorgio Agamben, one can relate this phrasing to the emergence of modern forms of governance which drew together state power and economic management, thereby also conflating idioms of politics with those of ‘despotic’ command.21 The possibility for such conflation was maximal in a colony, where there was least political interference from the governed, at least in an institutionalised form. The English East India Company historian John Bruce provided a Roman genealogy for this: Rome made its Proconsuls absolute in the provinces, but responsible to the Senate and People. Britain, in like manner, has made its Governor-general of India as absolute, apparently to the natives, as the ancient Soubahdars were, but responsible to the Directors, and to the controuling [sic] power, and both responsible to Parliament.22

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The language of quasi-monarchic command was also instrumentalised through a discourse on law. Rome was one source of inspiration, as visible in a letter sent in 1788 by William Jones to the Supreme Council of Bengal, requesting a digest of Hindu and Muslim laws for the people of British India; the model was Roman legal codification as carried out under Emperor Justinian.23 The project of colonial legal codification in India privileged the textual norms of Hindu and Muslim literate classes, which were often more hierarchical (including, patriarchal) in nature, while simultaneously marginalising the localised customs of the majority of the population. This was accompanied by imperial projects of demilitarisation, revenue maximisation, deindustrialisation and social classification which materially as well as discursively inferiorised South Asia’s peasant, pastoral, forest-dependent and artisan communities, while widening the sphere of influence of the literate gentry who were coopted by the colonial state as its subordinate collaborators.24 Reforms like the abolition of suttee in Bengal in 1829 and the advent of Western liberal ideas had to contend with this authoritarian and neo-traditionalist remodelling of India by the rule of the ‘orientalised’ Justinian. British rulership in India drew on this colonial hierarchisation. Christopher Bayly has argued that ‘the British empire from 1780 to 1830 (and in some areas beyond)’ represented: a series of attempts to establish overseas despotisms which mirrored in many ways the politics of neo-absolutism and the Holy Alliance of contemporary Europe. These colonial despotisms were characterised by a form of aristocratic military government supporting a viceregal autocracy, by a well-developed imperial style which emphasised hierarchy and racial subordination, and by the patronage of indigenous landed élites.25

This pompous statement of rulership found one visible expression in India in the official residence constructed by Governor-General Lord Wellesley in Calcutta (completed in 1803).26 Though the British destroyed Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore and the only Indian ruler to have forged a serious alliance with revolutionary France, in 1799, the conservative and militaristic reaction that characterised British metropolitan politics also left resonances in India. An early riposte to this global neo-absolutism can be found in Rammohun Roy who advocated a worldwide fight for civil and political liberties. He drew on precolonial Indian religion and history as well as on liberal politics in India, Europe and Latin America in the 1820s and early 1830s.27 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.002

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Monarchic pretensions legitimated annexations of proprietary rights from different categories of Indian rural society as well. Nicholas Dirks has shown how the British ‘used a formal interpretation of Mughal sovereignty to give themselves the right of general conquest. Time after time, the British refused to accept that rights in India – like sovereignty itself – were not conceived in terms of simple, uniform, or exclusive proprietary dominion’.28 Some British administrators retained appreciation for precolonial Indian forms of local governance and customary liberties; however, there was a rising emphasis on the virtues of strong centralised administration.29 There was a fiscal rationale to this. James Mill thus proclaimed that the king in India traditionally owned all land, an assumption that legitimated the state’s revenue maximisation drive by presenting the government as a supreme landlord. As Eric Stokes has shown, this stance was instantiated across southern and western India through the Ryotwari Settlement.30 Before a Select Committee set up to review Indian affairs before the Charter Act of 1833 was finalised, Mill thus testified that given the poverty and the dearth of industries in India, it was fortunate that the state could depend on land revenue for its income: Nine-tenths, probably, of the revenue of the government in India is derived from the rent of land, never appropriated to individuals, and always considered to be the property of government; and to me that appears to be one of the most fortunate circumstances that can occur in any country; because, in consequence of this the wants of the state are supplied, really and truly without taxation.31

In his book on India, Mill rooted ‘the proprietary rights of the sovereign’32 in history: The sovereigns in India had not only the ownership, but all the benefit of the land; the ryots had merely the privilege of employing their labour always upon the same soil, and of transferring that privilege to some other person; the sovereign claimed a right to as much of the produce as he pleased, and seldom left to the ryots more than a very scanty reward for their labour.33

This was the sort of idea of kingship that Bhudev Mukhopadhyay contested while drawing comparative fiscal histories of India and Britain.34 In case of the (chronologically earlier) Permanent Settlement, given a definitive shape in Bengal by Governor-General Lord Cornwallis in 1793, the state did not arrogate proprietorial authority, but bestowed it on the zamindars, who were transformed

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from a spectrum within the land hierarchy to a class of landlords with far more absolute property rights than they had enjoyed before, and that also enabled them to increase extortionist practices vis-à-vis the peasants.35 In both the Permanent and the Ryotwari Settlements, a new ‘monistic’ order of property rights emerged, based on a singular category of ‘landlord’; this bolstered kingliness among the zamindars or the state’s self-understanding of itself as an ersatz monarch. However, the decentralised nature of land control and customary rights could never be totally eradicated; through their layered hierarchies, peasants could carve out spaces of freedom, of social mobility as well as revolt.

Meanwhile, the British steadily reduced the political functions and territorial sway of the Mughal ruler to a nominal level. British parliamentary supervision of the Company’s rule gradually introduced new notions of the Crown’s sovereignty over India. By 1857, the British may have dominated India in political and military terms, but, in conceptual and ceremonial languages of authority, there was competition between Mughal rulership, the English East India Company and the British Crown. During the rebellion of 1857, Indian soldiers, peasants and chiefs disaffected with British rule seized on the lingering traces of precolonial rulership to rally around the Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar. The rebels also drew on novel forms of anti-colonial communitarian patriotism. 36 The rebellion was however crushed, and the Mughal ruler captured, tried, and exiled to Burma, charged that though he was ‘a subject of the British Government in India’, he did ‘as a false traitor against the State, proclaim and declare himself the reigning king and sovereign of India’.37 The propriety of this charge may be contested, given that the British had originally derived their authority from the Mughal throne, whose sovereignty had never been formally extinguished. In any case, following the rebellion, Company rule was ended, and India came under the direct authority of the British Crown through the Government of India Act of 1858. In this context, the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 avowed a benevolent image of British rulership to justify colonial rule, promising to all subjects of the Crown, irrespective of race and creed, equal treatment and admission to government offices. Indians were guaranteed freedom of religion, material welfare (for example through public works), and economic development; the princes were assured of their rights and territories.38 As we shall see, this idea of benevolent monarchy had a profound impact on Indian political discussions.

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1.3 Wielding imperium: The logic of monarchic unity in British imperial imagination, ca. 1858–1919 The next major step in royalising colonial governance came in 1876. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was the main instigator (apart from Queen Victoria) of the Royal Titles Act of 1876, which enabled the Queen to take her imperial title.39 Disraeli wanted to demonstrate, through this move, ‘the unanimous determination of the people of this country to retain our connection with the Indian Empire’, against warnings given by ‘economists’ and ‘foreign diplomatists’.40 Fellow Conservative parliamentarian William Grantham felt that the epithet of Empress of India would engender Indian feelings of ‘patriotism’ to the empire, gathering ‘the varied interests of the peoples and Princes of India’, ‘all collected together under one Sovereign’ who ‘was their own Ruler, their own Empress’. It would prevent ‘these Princes and Powers’ from uniting with ‘the desire to drive out their common conqueror’. Rather, they would become more loyal, as ‘they ceased to be subject to one who was only Queen of a foreign land; they would be subject to their own Sovereign’.41

British parliamentary discussions referred to diverse precedents, ranging from King Henry VIII’s sixteenth century use of ‘empire’ to articulate an idea of sovereignty, to notions of imperial rulership articulated by ancient Romans, by the Holy Roman Empire and by French and German emperors in the nineteenth century. There were debates about the sense of despotic rule, in Britain and in India, which the imperial title might convey.42 It was feared that the title would alienate Indians, and especially the Western-educated classes, by rendering too transparent the violent foundations of British rule in India. Robert Lowe thus noted that the term ‘king’ connoted being ‘under the law because the law makes the King’, while the Roman-origin term ‘emperor’ implied that ‘in all things the will of the Emperor is to be accepted’. It was not prudent to make such ‘a marked distinction’ between Britain and India ‘by giving to our Sovereign a title which implies obedience to law, and to their Sovereign a title which implies the supremacy of force’. India had been won ‘by the sword’, but it was not ‘wise to state it’, it was ‘one of those things that had better not be put prominently forward’. Rather, Indians had to be told that their earlier rulers were ‘Mahomedan conquerors’; one had ‘to teach the Natives of India that those men reigned for their own pleasure and gratification, the welfare of their people being a secondary consideration; and that our object, on the contrary, is simply to do as much good to the people under our Government Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.002

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as possible, and to spend their money, not in luxury, debauchery, and show, but in promoting their interests materially and morally’. Thus, it was better to associate British rule in India with memories of the kings of Britain and ‘the triumphs of her civilization’, rather than of ‘the wretches who have filled the throne of Imperial Rome’.43 Not everyone was as tactful in veiling the language of colonial conquest through a language of genteel civilizing mission. Percy Wyndham suggested that Victoria was Queen in the United Kingdom since it possessed ‘a Constitutional Government’, just as Francis Joseph was King in Hungary. But she ‘ought to be styled Empress of India where the Government was despotic’, as the Habsburg ruler was Emperor in Austria where ‘his Government was a despotism […]. India was not a representative Government, but a Government of Lieutenant Governors and Commissioners not elected by the people of India’.44 It was ‘a despotic Government as administered by us, although it includes more than one individual’.45 To sugarcoat this despotic rule, Disraeli invoked the historian Edward Gibbon, suggesting that ‘the happiness of mankind was never so completely assured, or for so long a time maintained, as in the age of the Antonines – and the Antonines were Emperors.’ 46 To this, Gladstone’s retort was that one did not always have ‘[...] Antonines to govern us. If we had, even some of the machinery and labour of this House might be dispensed with.’ 47 Gladstone confessed that Wyndham had a point, in the sense that the British did ‘govern India without the restraints of a law except such law as we make ourselves’. But he did not wish to advertise that: ‘[B]y the assumption of the title of Empress I, for one, will not attempt to turn into glory that which, so far as it is true, I feel to be our weakness and our calamity.’ 48

The debates of 1876 resulted in a partial localisation of the imperial title: Victoria was to be Empress of India, but not of Britain itself.49 The British monarch developed two bodies: a constitutionalist body representing the British nation (and with respect to the white settler colonies, a unitary AngloSaxon racial identity) and a ‘despotic’ (and properly ‘Roman’) body, facing non-white dependencies like India. In the eighteenth century, in parallel with ideas of ‘oriental despotism’, there had been alternate strands of thinking which placed Indian rulership and a polity of checks and balances on a level of commensurability with Europe; by the late-nineteenth century, in British imperial imagination, these latter ideas had become marginal. This graduated trajectory of bifurcation of sovereignty was a globally entangled process; the

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imagining of India as a land of despotic sovereignty facilitated the imagining of Britain as a land of constitutional sovereignty and vice versa. The ‘despotism’ of the colony was an innovative form of industrial-modern despotism – not personal rule of a monarch, but the authoritarian rule of metropole over colonial periphery, and fitted to pursue economic extraction through the language of welfare, progress and civilization. Of course, in 1876, Britain, with its restricted electorate, was itself hardly a perfect democracy. The France of Napoleon III and newly unified Germany posed recent examples of authoritarian rule in the heart of Europe: a worrying sign, for some Liberal politicians, about the implications of an imperial title.50 It was only a slow process through which the territorialised bifurcation between constitutionalist and despotic sovereignty would become so radically clear.51 Imperial competition was a major factor behind the Royal Titles Act. The British had insisted, already in the late 1830s, that the Persian state refer to Victoria through the imperial title of padshah, rather than through the ‘inferior’ malikeh. The Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to this in 1876, while observing that the Russian monarch’s imperial title necessitated a similar title for the British ruler. The Chancellor noted how Viceroy Lord Northbrook, while communicating with the Ameer of Yarkand (in Central Asia) in 1873, referred to Victoria as ‘the Queen of India and the Empress of Hindostan’.52 Disraeli felt that the British monarch deserved the imperial title to assert Britain’s claims against the Russian sphere of power in Asia, and to thereby impress common Indians as well.53 An imperial comparative frame inspired the Hungarian-origin Orientalist G. W. Leitner to coin the term Kaisar-i-Hind (literally, Caesar of India) as the Indian translation of the imperial title. In an essay published in May 1876, he specified that Indians used the title Caesar in its variants, like Kaisar and Chasar, to refer to the emperors of Rome, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, ‘oriental’ titles like shah, shahinshah, padishah and sultan were used far more loosely. The title of imperatrix or imperator was also suitable, since Indians referred to the Tsar as imperator.54 The suggestion attracted Viceroy Lord Lytton. In a letter to the Secretary of State for India Lord Salisbury written in July, Lytton expressed dislike for titles like padishah which were used by many ‘inferior’ ‘oriental princes’. He wanted a title which could be rendered in Sanskrit and in Arabic, while being ‘thoroughly familiar to the oriental mind’ in India and in Central Asia ‘as the recognised symbol of imperial power. It is

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Kaiser-i-Hind.’ Lytton found the title ‘sonorous’, and not ‘monopolised, by any crown since that of the Roman Caesars, who bequeathed to it [...] a lofty and mysterious place in the imagination of the eastern populations.’ He thought that Kaiser was ‘in common use throughout the east for the title of emperor.’ Lytton preferred a masculine title since ‘sovereignty should have no recognised sex. If Her Majesty were Queen of Hungary, she would be Rex, not Regina.’55 George Birdwood of the India Office, in a letter written to the Athenaeum in November 1876, remarked on the supposed deflated valence as well as confessional exclusivity of Islamic titles like malik, sultan, shahinshah and padishah, and of Hindu titles like raja and adhiraja. Contrastively, the title kaisar, rooted in Rome, allegedly still exerted a universal grandeur, being used by Indians to refer to the Ottoman and Russian emperors.56 Russo-British antagonism over Asia and British fear of the impact of Russia on Indian minds was a clear motivation behind the new royal title.57 The example of other empires, including of the Ottomans and of newly unified Germany, also instigated the move. In part, the British were trying to track, and get an advantage over, the ways in which Asian public spheres were translating Western titles of monarchic rulership.58 However, George Hamilton had to explain in Parliament that the British were not simply copying the German title of Kaiser, but were basing themselves on Biblical as well as Arabic and Persian precedents.59 The creation of a colonial language of monarchic sovereignty, however, had to contend with the hurdle of ‘oriental’ slippage. I would argue that the translation of sovereignty claims into Asiatic languages was characterised by a continual aphasia: it was difficult to convey the modern notion of monistic state sovereignty through Indic or Islamic languages of authority. European Orientalists and administrators felt that in Indian and Islamic worlds regal titles were in crisis owing to their indiscriminate usage by small and big rulers; it was not feasible therefore to designate a European sovereign through such flexible Asian titles. The global space of inter-imperial agonism also necessitated a grammar of authority which commanded respect among Great Powers. The language of sovereignty, even in its ‘oriental’ masquerade, thus had to be rooted in European history; hence the strange hybrid whereby a Roman title was Indianised. Lytton’s insistence on the use of the masculine gender to denote a female monarch hinted at the patriarchal foundations of (colonial) sovereignty. Despite various ambivalences, many British intellectuals and administrators

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searched for Asiatic precedents for British rule in India. Charles Lewis Tupper, in his treatise on the relation between the British Crown and the native states, thus declared that ‘in conceptions of sovereignty we are the heirs of the Moghals, and that they were the heirs of the Hindu rajas’.60 In his biography of Akbar, Colonel G. B. Malleson linked Mughal and British viceregal spectacles to argue that it was ‘necessary to strike the eye, to let the subjects see the very majesty of power, the ‘pomp and circumstance’ attending the being whose nod indicates authority, who is to them the personified concentration on earth of the attributes of the Almighty.’ To Indians, Malleson imagined, ‘the man in authority, the supreme wielder of power, sits in the place of God’.61 Akbar was indeed a special object of veneration for many late-nineteenth century imperial minds, someone who represented the promulgation of intellectual and religious freedoms, and the enclosure of these within an authoritarian framework of progress. Tennyson’s poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’, thus, linked the Mughal king to the British state in terms of a vision of progressive rulership that rose above India’s warring creeds and castes.62 The trope of ‘Akbar’ provided a point of departure for John Stuart Mill to generally discuss the relation between despotism and freedom in On Liberty (1859): Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. […] For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.63

For Mill, authoritarian rulership, exercised without the consent of the governed, offered the dark prehistory of liberal notions of temporality and progress. For the individual to become sovereign, they had to pass through a preparatory exercise of despotic sovereignty: ‘Akbar’ was a signifier of this

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irony. James Fitzjames Stephen later invoked Mill, to argue that compulsion was in fact essential for governing all societies: Akbar or Charlemagne represented the substitution of anarchy by ‘the vigorous rule of one Sovereign’.64 From this stance, obedience to the monarch and to laws was as necessary in Britain as in India. But, as Eric Stokes has shown, Stephen saw a monarchically-inflected ideology of coercion to be more suited for ruling non-white races: a stance that became especially visible during the race tensions that erupted in India and Britain during the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883.65 From this imperial location, Stephen identified Pax Britannica, as celebrated by the imperial assemblage of 1877 in Delhi, with the universal peace brought about by the birth of Jesus.66 For many British administrators, monarchic hierarchy provided a traditional pivot of colonial rule. During the 1877 assemblage, Viceroy Lytton proclaimed that imperial administration demanded ‘attributes not exclusively intellectual’; rather it needed ‘those who, by birth, rank, and hereditary influence’ were ‘natural leaders’ of the Indians.67 Like many other late-nineteenth century colonial officials, Lytton had begun to despair of Western-educated Indians who wrote ‘semi-seditious articles in the native Press’. In contrast, he urged that the British cultivate the Indian nobility, since it was to them that Indian peasants were loyal. Lytton compared the latter to Italian peasants who had allegedly remained passive or followed the Italian nobility when the latter rose against Habsburg rule. Hence Lytton felt (as visible in a letter he wrote to Lord Salisbury) that rather than thinking exclusively in terms of ‘good government’, of ‘improving the condition of the ryot, strictly administering justice, spending immense sums on irrigation works’, the British should try to keep Indian aristocrats loyal by rewarding them with honours, without giving them ‘any increased political power independent of our own’.68 This British effort to gain elite loyalty found visible form in new orders of chivalry, which, reflecting imperial taxonomies and hierarchies, were separated into Hindu and Muslim camps and prioritised men over women.69 Further, Indians almost never got metropolitan British hereditary honours: Baron Sinha of Raipur, the first Indian to enter the House of Lords as a hereditary peer, created a (controversial) exception.70 Differences in courtesy titles, gun salutes, armorial bearings and ceremonial norms enhanced the asymmetrical grandeur of imperial monarchy.71 From the late-seventeenth century, the upward mobility of peasants and intermediate groups (through and against Mughal sinews)

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had led to a crisis in the composition of aristocratic elites and even a partial subalternisation of the ruling order in India. Colonial rule attempted, in part, to overturn this trajectory, and to restore a social harmony underpinned by a state-determined hierarchy of precedence.

This colonial hierarchy encoded a way of centralising power, not of parcelling it into a pre-state feudal or segmentary system. This was visible even in ceremonial semiotics. The British state exerted surveillance and control to prevent Indian princes and notables from assuming ‘emblems of Royalty and other badges to which they are not entitled, and the use of which in India is a privilege restricted to the representative of the Sovereign alone’.72 Ultimate authority, including its symbolic form, was to be concentrated in a sovereign centre. In his short story ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ (1894), Rudyard Kipling celebrated this monarchic centralisation; he argued that the British, united in their obedience to a monarch, could outdo the Afghans because the latter did not obey their prince. As an officer in the story put it: “Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.” “Would it were so in Afghanistan!” said the chief; “for there we obey only our own wills.” “And for that reason,” said the native officer, twirling his mustache, “your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.” 73

Ancient Rome offered a vehicle as well for thinking about commandoriented state authority. Frank Turner has indicated that from the midnineteenth century, many British minds showed a greater appreciation of Julius Caesar and of the Principate; this was related to a rising elite desire for a strong political leadership that could potentially transcend the class and factional conflicts of contemporary society.74 Duncan Bell specifies that the Roman model was however often deemed more suited for the non-white dependencies than for the metropole or the white settler colonies.75 This racial inflection of the Roman model is clearly visible in Lord Dufferin, who invoked

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the ‘imperium’ of the British ‘Sovereign’ to valorise the goal ‘of an alien race’ to ‘arbitrate between a multitude of conflicting or antagonistic interests’ in India.76 Lord Curzon deployed an analogous spatially segregated concept of Roman imperium while addressing the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh in 1909: In the strict use of the term, India is indeed the only part of the British Empire which is an empire. Nothing less like an empire in the traditional sense can well be conceived than the wonderful aggregation of communities, clinging to each other by common consent rather than by any compulsion from a superior ruling power, which acknowledges the sovereignty of our King. Indeed, though we speak of the British Empire, we never call its monarch the British Emperor, preferring to adhere to the older and more appropriate title of King. But in India he is rightly termed the Emperor, or King-Emperor, because there his power is that of the Roman Imperator, exercised it is true through his Ministry responsible to Parliament, but wielded without the restraint of many of the checks with which we are familiar in Western States possessing what is called constitutional government.77

Why present the colonial monarch as a Roman Imperator, especially at a time of rising Indian nationalist politics? The quest to make imperial unity visible offered one motivation, as can be seen from a speech given by Curzon in 1902 (while he was still Viceroy) to the Legislative Council of India. Justifying a coronation durbar in Delhi for Edward VII, he announced: ‘The life and vigour of a nation are summed up before the world in the person of its sovereign. He symbolises its unity, and speaks for it in the gate.’ India had indeed ‘acknowledged a single ruler’ under the British, but still ‘a demonstration of its reality’ was needed. For Curzon, the King-Emperor was a kind of visible mystical head of whom the empire was the body politic: In all our various divisions in this country — divisions of race and class and custom and creed — the one thing that holds us together, and subordinates the things that make for separation to the compelling force of union, is loyalty to a common head, membership of the same body politic, fellowcitizenship of the same Empire.78

To Curzon, singular rulership articulated a temporality of relentless progress. The imperial monarchy embodied the march of providence through world history, a translation of providential time to human time. The durbar

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of 1903 was ‘a chapter in the ritual of the State’, ‘meant to remind all the Princes and peoples of the Asiatic Empire of the British Crown that they had passed under the dominion of a new and single Sovereign’, so they would learn ‘that under that benign influence they were one; that they were not scattered atoms in a heterogeneous and cumbersome mass, but co-ordinate units in a harmonious and majestic whole’. The aim of the related festivities was ‘to lift an entire people for a little space out of the rut of their narrow and parochial lives, and to let them catch a glimpse of a higher ideal, an appreciation of the hidden laws that regulate the march of nations and the destinies of men’. The durbar, ‘more than any event in modern history, showed to the Indian people the path which, under the guidance of Providence, they are treading, taught the Indian Empire its unity, and impressed the world with its moral as well as material force.’79 In his speech at the durbar, Curzon argued that British rule would bring about ‘the march of progress’ in India, but only through ‘the unchallenged supremacy of the Paramount Power, and under no other controlling authority is this capable of being maintained than that of the British Crown.’80 Curzon similarly linked monarchic unity, dynastic glory and the notion of imperial and global progress, while advocating the building of a memorial hall to Victoria in Calcutta. He urged that the hall should begin its commemoration with Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, since throughout ‘the world progress seems to have taken a definite leap forward’ from around the sixteenth century, as in England ‘with the Tudors, in Russia with Ivan the Terrible, in France with Francis I, in Germany with Charles V, in Turkey with Solyman the Magnificent, in Persia with the Sefavi dynasty, in Japan with Iyeyasu.’81

Curzon regarded the British ‘Sovereign’ as a ‘personal’ force to Indians, and saw the Viceroy as representing both the justice of the royal government as well as the ‘personal attributes’ of the monarch.82 Impersonal governance was conflated here with face-to-face sovereignty; colonial administration was partly disguised as personal rule. J. A. Baines argued similarly before the Royal Statistical Society in London in 1911 that the British Crown was significant to the Dominions, but was uniquely valuable for those ‘not of our own or kindred race’, to whom ‘forms of government are abstractions which make no appeal to them, but a Personality, permanent and above all local authorities, who come and go, is understood by all.’ From this attitude stemmed the ‘personal reverence’ of Indians towards Victoria.83 In a comparable vein,

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Theodore Morison differentiated between the ‘personal affection’ of Indians towards the monarch and the less personal, more ‘national’, feeling of Britons towards her.84 He felt that the settler colonies could therefore unite with Britain through feelings of ‘pride of race’ rather than through royalism; however in dependencies like India and Egypt, ‘it is not desirable that this pride of race should be publicly expressed.’ Here ‘imperial sentiment’ should be expressed through ‘pride in and devotion to one great Queen’, masking the racial basis of British rule. So he urged the British to keep invisible the ‘unlovable machine called the Government of India’, and to rather highlight ‘the sovereign’s part in government’ in the manner of Napoleon III in France.85 For Morison, as for Disraeli, Dufferin and Curzon, India was too heterogeneous a country. It was devoid of a ‘sentiment of nationality’, which was a prerequisite of ‘independence’. If British rule ended, ‘the different races and creeds’ in India ‘would never agree to a common line of action’.86 The British had in fact, he confessed, fostered sectarian divides.87 Hence the importance of a strong and unified government, symbolised by the imperial monarchy: the governments of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico and Francesco Crispi in Italy also provided inspiration, apart from Second Empire France. Morison felt that encouraging liberal-national sentiments was unviable in such a scenario; the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph had supposedly shown how such a move could backfire and threaten imperial unity.88 From the late-nineteenth century, a new regalising wave also influenced colonial architecture, drawing in part on Mughal and Rajput elements, and often resulting in ‘Indo-Saracenic’ buildings.89 The Victoria Memorial Hall (initiated by Curzon in 1902, and opened by the Prince of Wales in 1921), a tribute to the Queen-Empress, marked an aesthetic pinnacle of this wave in Calcutta, with a Mughal style ornamented into a European neoclassical structure. The aim was, in Curzon’s words, ‘not merely to express its [India’s] deep devotion to the late Queen’s memory, but also to demonstrate to the world […] the truth of that Imperial unity which was so largely the creation of her personality and reign.’90 Following the transfer of the capital of India to Delhi (announced in 1911), an even more grandiose architectural project was launched. The Viceregal Palace in Delhi drew on Indic, Islamic and European classical grammars, and had at its heart the Durbar Hall with the viceregal thrones.91

Meanwhile, many supporters of empire argued for the significance of the

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British monarchy even for the settler colonies. Bernard Holland’s Imperium et Libertas (1901) saw the monarchy as the sacred fulcrum of an imperial sovereignty (summum imperium), able to exert a hegemonic influence over the settler colonies as well as the dependencies: At present the direct relations of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the rest, are with the Crown. It is not merely the symbol but the real bond of unity. As, without the relation of each of its provinces to the Supreme Pontiff, the cosmopolitan and many-nationed Church which centres at Rome could not hold together, so, without the relation of each of its parts to the King, the British Empire would fall asunder and be dispersed. […] But in all these lands, east and west, the holder of the Throne is to every man his own sovereign. A Real Presence, if one may so speak, makes itself felt throughout the world. […] Ideas to rule men through imagination must be incarnate; and, if they are to rule great masses of men in every degree of civilisation and intelligence, must be embodied in a form easily understood by the simplest through their experience of family life. There are not many Miltons in the world whose strength of imagination can clothe abstractions, and a Republic, like some forms of religion, is only suited to a few homogeneous peoples. England or Australia might be a Republic; not so the British Empire.92

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald used a similar Eucharistic language as late as 1935 to describe George V’s silver jubilee, attended by the Dominion Premiers: ‘Here the Empire was a great family, the gathering a family reunion, the King a paternal head. We all went away feeling that we had taken part in something very much like a Holy Communion.’93 The notion that rulership had to be made incarnate and not be merely abstract, that sovereignty should be visible and connect state and people in a sacral bond, was integral to the political theology of empire: as we shall see, such a notion also appealed to many Indian nationalists. Other voices however disrupted the narrative of sacred monarchy. In 1860, in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, Bartle Frere suggested the need to consider Indian opinion within the colonial legislature. It was ‘perilous’ ‘to legislate for millions of people, with few means of knowing, except by a rebellion, whether the laws suit them or not’. If despotism had to be tempered by public opinion, the model of oriental monarchy which proved attractive was the ‘durbar of a native Prince’:

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To it under a good ruler all have access, very considerable license of speech is permitted, and it is in fact the channel from which the ruler learns how his measures are likely to affect his subjects, and may hear of discontent before it becomes disaffection.94

This discussion, whose broader context is formed by the passage of the Indian Councils Act of 1861, did not herald a linear constitutionalisation of monarchic discourse; this is evident from the parliamentary debates of 1876. Dufferin’s comment about the imperium of the British monarch, cited earlier, was an overture towards ‘liberal’ political reform, especially to allow limited participation of (elite) Indians ‘in the administration of public affairs’, such as in government councils. But Dufferin denied that this would culminate in an English form of parliamentary government. Most nationalities in India were ‘in a very backward state of civilization and enlightenment’; hence, ‘no matter to what degree the liberalisation of the councils may now take place, it will be necessary to leave in the hands of each provincial Government the ultimate decision upon all important questions, and the paramount control of its own policy.’95

Discussions leading up to the Indian Councils Act of 1909, known as the Morley-Minto reforms (after Secretary of State for India John Morley and Viceroy Lord Minto),96 help us track the continual debates on colonial rulership. Confronted with Indian political aspirations, some British administrators attempted to refigure imperial rule. The Commissioner of Mandalay, D. H. R. Twomby, thus felt that people in India and Burma would not remain satisfied for long: with the despotism of an alien bureaucracy, however benevolent in its intentions and just in its methods. I think, therefore, that it is the interest as well as the duty of the British Government to train the people gradually in the art of administration and the Advisory Councils are the first stage in the course of instruction.

These would ‘implant the idea of representation in the minds of the people’, and express ‘the wish to associate the people in the Government of the country’.97 Other administrators however denied the necessity for such a move. The nature of discussion was summarised in the next decade by Secretary of State Edwin S. Montagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford as they finalised their constitutional reforms leading to the Government of India Act of 1919:

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The problem which Lord Minto's Government set themselves to solve was how to fuse in one single government the two elements which they discerned in the origins of British power in India. They hoped to blend the principle of autocracy derived from Moghul emperors and Hindu kings with the principle of constitutionalism derived from the British Crown and Parliament; to create a constitutional autocracy, which differing toto coelo from Asiatic despotisms, should bind itself to govern by rule, should call to its counsels representatives of all interests which were capable of being represented, and should merely reserve to itself in the form of a narrow majority predominant and absolute power. They hoped to create a constitution about which conservative opinion would crystallise and offer substantial opposition to any further change.98 The Morley-Minto reforms in our view are the final outcome of the old conception which made the Government of India a benevolent despotism (tempered by a remote and only occasionally vigilant democracy), which might as it saw fit for purposes of enlightenment consult the wishes of its subjects. To recur to Sir Bartle Frere's figure, the Government is still a monarch in durbar; but his councillors are uneasy, and not wholly content with his personal rule; and the administration in consequence has become slow and timid in operation.99

We can place within this trajectory of conscious diminution of the idiom of monarchic rule, Chelmsford’s address to the Indian Legislature in 1921. About the Declaration of August 1917 made by Montagu to the House of Commons, promising ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’,100 Chelmsford suggested: For the first time the principle of autocracy, which had not wholly been discarded in all earlier reforms, was definitely abandoned; the conception of the British Government as a benevolent despotism, was finally renounced, and in its place was substituted that of a guiding authority whose role it would be to assist the steps of India along the road that, in the fullness of time, would lead to complete self-government.101

Not everyone agreed. One of the die-hards was Vincent Smith, whose famous history of ancient India concluded that ‘Indians, like other Asiatic peoples, usually have been content with simple despotic rule’. The Indian constitution being devised was ‘a foreign importation, imperfectly intelligible

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to the people for whose benefit it is intended, and never likely to be thoroughly acclimatized’.102 In recommendations he offered when the Government of India Act of 1919 was being introduced, he stressed that India needed ‘a strong, impartial government, in a position above all sections and able to protect the liberty of minorities’. He denounced the idea of Home Rule ‘in the sense of government by a pure majority, which in India would mean pure Hindu rule’.103 Smith believed that most Indians ‘cherish as their ideal of government that of the virtuous Raja, who works hard, is easily accessible, is sternly and impartially just, yet loves his people as a father loves his children, and is guided by the advice of wise ministers’. Given that ‘ordinary’ Indians ‘do not understand impersonal government’ or ‘elective councils’,104 the British state needed to tap into their desire for a strong and benevolent kingship. On this note, he advocated for a Viceroy who would come from the British royal family and was to be assisted by a separate Governor-General. The state should also aim at ‘utilizing to the fullest possible extent the genuine feelings of loyalty to H.M. the King-Emperor entertained by all classes of Indians’. Smith detailed rituals through which such feelings could be aroused. Thus, ‘on all great occasions of ceremony’, the Royal Standard should be flown alongside a flag of India, and it should be stressed: that the Viceroy was acting on such occasions as the personal representative of his Sovereign, and not merely as the head of the impersonal Government of India. For instance, the placing of an empty throne bearing the imperial crown behind and above the Viceregal chair of state would be intelligible to everybody and agreeable to custom. Other similar expressions of the living authority of the absent Sovereign could be easily devised and worked out.105

Smith confessed here a central problematic of the British Empire in India: the problem of ‘the absent Sovereign’. Colonialism offered diverse models of economic extraction, military policing and political control of the colonised, yet dreamt of being a unitary force of benevolence, a personal sovereign who would care for Indians and gain the loyalty, reverence and affection of ordinary people. But it was difficult to convert the diversity of forces which carried out the business of taxing and soldiering into a unitary father figure who loved his children. Yet throughout the colonial period, significant sections of British as well as Indian opinion remained ill at ease with ‘impersonal’ government. The desire for a personal sovereign reflected anxieties about modern power: for the

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British, because modern ‘impersonal’ power removed the mask of affectionate benevolence from empire and implicitly questioned the privileged position of the colonisers as the guardians of the colonised; for Indians, because this form of governance came to them through the brute reality of economic exploitation and racial subordination. Smith’s ‘empty throne’ remained empty to the end.

Today, there is a striking architectural reminder of this empty throne in New Delhi. From the canopy that stands across from India Gate (on a straight axis – the ceremonial avenue once called King’s Way and now vernacularised as Rajpath – from Rashtrapati Bhavan, the former Palace of the Viceroy), the statue of King-Emperor George V has been long removed by the independent Indian state.106 But there is no replacement for the British monarch yet; the canopy stands empty, almost a symbol for the emptiness that occupies the centre of majesty in the national capital of a democratic state. Under the canopy in the Durbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan though, there has been an act of overwriting. Above, and behind, the President’s Chair – itself a postcolonial replacement of the thrones of the Viceroy and the Vicereine – has been placed a fifth century statue of the Buddha:107 the British royal coat of arms neatly replaced by a symbol of sacred and ethical sovereignty. This substitution of colonial monarchic sovereignty by sacral-national sovereignty is a theme we shall pursue across this book. For now, let it suffice to say that Indian nationalists adopted the rhetoric of personalised benevolence to articulate the creation of the nation-state and the supposed paternalist trusteeship of the elites over the populace. Yet, political power is often as much about hierarchy and exploitation as about ‘personalised’ welfare; the rhetoric of welfare thus sits ill at ease with the operations of ‘impersonal’ social authority and political government. This is true not merely of colonial empires, but of modern states as such, including nation-states. Modern states may offer majestic visions of benevolent governance, but they operate through pluralised networks of extractive power. An empty throne – or a throne subordinated to a transcendental vision of ethics – offers a hieroglyph for capturing this irony.108

1.4 Vernacularising and subverting the colonial emperor-cult, ca. 1858–1919 Confronted with colonial propaganda on the virtues of singular rulership (in the British mode), Indians resorted to diverse responses. Across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Indian landholding elites frequently celebrated the

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honours they had received from the Crown and the durbars they had attended. Through charitable, artistic and literary patronage, they projected themselves as righteous rajas and ranis and linked themselves to the imperial monarch and the Viceroy who were perceived as enacting on a grander scale the same universe of benefaction. Simultaneously, they asserted autonomy by transforming the British colonial space into a sphere of Indic morality, normativising their activities through South Asian idioms of distributive rulership. They used their aristocratic rank to counter a generalised badge of racial inferiority. They also had to ward off threats posed by middle-class politicians and insurgent or litigious peasants. In Bengal, the zamindar elites who had benefited from the Permanent Settlement of 1793 projected themselves as benevolent kingly and queenly rulers (while the land-structure was male-dominated, there were celebrated female zamindars too). Outside Bengal, landed magnates like the rajas of Darbhanga (Bihar) and Ramnad (Madras Presidency), the taluqdars of Awadh, and samasthan rajas in Hyderabad, modelled themselves in comparable ways as welfare-bestowing rulers.109

While colonial rule had destabilising effects on the political economy of India, and especially of Bengal, already from the late-eighteenth century, it was only gradually during the nineteenth century that Bengal was steadily converted into a classic exporter of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods. As Bengali enterprise faltered against European capital, Bengali elites became ever more dependent on land and service for their income and status. In this context, the zamindars offered images of paternalist guardianship to native society, even as British fiscal-political control reduced the possibilities of largesse-distributing rulership and martial prowess in the precolonial mode. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, while zamindars were bestowed with honorific titles by the British, their authority was also steadily constrained by colonial tenancy laws (which gradually assumed a pro-peasant tenor) and by peasant politics, litigation and revolt.110 The attitudes of Bengali landed magnates towards royalty and rulership should be contextualised within this milieu. An example of Bengali elite royalism is offered by Raja Sourindro Mohun Tagore who wrote volumes praising British royalty, attempted in the 1880s to vernacularise ‘God Save the Queen’ and make it a popular anthem among Indians, and emphasised loyalty towards rulers in general.111 The Mullick family of Chorebagan in Calcutta offers another instance. They showed their

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‘staunch loyalty’ on the death of Edward VII and the accession of George V by organizing prayers and hymns, and by giving alms, food and clothes to the poor. During the First World War, they helped raise contributions to the Imperial Indian Relief Fund, to align themselves with their ‘most beloved Sovereign who […] is taking keen interest in our Indian troops and sympathising with all Indians in general’.112

The Raja of Santosh’s royalism was specifically provoked by the Partition of Bengal in 1905 and the coeval visit of the Prince of Wales (future George V). The colonially-engineered Partition, which separated Hindu-majority western Bengal from the Muslim-majority east, aimed at weakening the (primarily upper caste Hindu) middle classes who led early Indian nationalist politics. But it also challenged Hindu zamindar authority. In this context, the Raja urged the British to affirm the zamindars as the original ‘sovereign’ power of Bengal who would mediate between the state and the people. Criticising the Congress, he advocated an association of zamindars so that ‘their control over the mass will’ ‘become as efficient and effective as it was when the present day political leaders were conspicuous by their absence’. Its motto would be ‘Long live the King’.113 Extremes of zamindari loyalism however invited Indian nationalist sarcasm. During the visit of the Prince of Wales (future Edward VIII) in 1921, the newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika ridiculed a spokesman for the zamindars in the Bengal Legislative Council, since he had described the king as chalanta (moving) Vishnu and had labelled those who opposed the visit as chhotalok or lower classes.114

Indians sometimes ‘vernacularised’ imperial royalty through texts in diverse languages, including Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Bhartendu Harishchandra, often considered as the ‘father’ of modern Hindi literature, honoured Queen Victoria and the visiting royals, the Duke of Edinburgh (1870) and the Prince of Wales (1875), with eulogistic poems.115 In Bengal, through charitas (biographies), kavyas (long poems), songs and plays written in Bengali and Sanskrit, members of the literati cast Victoria, Edward VII and George V as ethical rulers who cared for the people, provided peace, justice and prosperity, and represented a model of family life. The colonial state was transformed into an Indian raja to whom rajabhakti or devotion to the ruler could be offered. The unity of righteous order was visualised in the unity of the imperial monarch. In this spirit, the authors often propagated the unity of the British Empire and the fraternity of all subjects, cutting across race borders.116 As a Bengali text,

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written under the patronage of the famous zamindar Maharani Svarnamayi to commemorate the 1877 assemblage, and dedicated to Viceroy Lytton, noted: White brothers living in England, today is a great holy day on earth, let us smilingly embrace each other, so that our hearts and bodies are comforted. Let us brothers share one mind, one life, one body, let us bind ourselves to each other through love, and serve the feet of Victoria.117

Such texts were written by people associated with arenas as diverse as the governmental education system, landholding, theatre and astrology, and they often craved the favourable attention of colonial officials or of elite Indian patrons. Some desired circulation of their works as schoolbooks. Colonial propaganda needs were occasionally directly involved: for instance, the Government of Bengal ordered a Bengali translation of an English volume describing the 1911–12 visit of George V to India.118 Almost all of these charitas, kavyas and plays presented elaborate descriptions of royal ceremonies, particularly of coronations, jubilees, durbars and funerals, demonstrating some success of the colonial state in imprinting veneration for British pageantry among the ruled. These texts often operated through episodic frames, focussing on particular events which depicted the sovereigns as virtuous human beings. Colonial power was anthropomorphised to render it innocuous. Realistic reportage in the texts was sometimes mixed with dreamlike sequences where historical figures mingled with characters from Indian purana-itihasa legends, and British characters acted out the will of the gods. Such fantasy modes upheld British rule. Simultaneously, they implicitly deprived the colonial rulers of their racial superiority and presented them as instruments of a celestial order of which Indians possessed special knowledge and where ultimate authority rested with Indic gods. Present-day sovereigns were linked to a cosmic dramaturgy of rulership, while royal ceremonies reminded the reader of the grandeur as well as transience of worldly power. Occasionally the authors articulated an Indian patriotism. Girishchandra Ghosh’s play on Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee invoked the Queen to ask for removal of racial discrimination, for training in rights (adhikarer shiksha), and for industrial development of India, especially in cotton-textile and salt manufactures. India’s agrarian distress, the poverty of peasants and the frequency of famines under colonial rule, were all discussed. Ghosh urged: Mother, turn your glance towards your poor subjects who cultivate the soil;

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we are without means, without wealth, and poor; turn your merciful glance towards us. Keep India’s grains in India. Look mother, there is famine in India, in the granary of the world.119

Protests against colonial exploitation were thus translated into personalised requests to the monarch. Avowals of allegiance were often cries to the imperial conscience and not primordial articulations of loyalty.

Victoria’s appeal rested in part on her maternal image. In Bengal, traditionally known for its goddess-centred religiosity, Victoria was often portrayed as a quasi-divine figure compared, in some texts at least, to Indian goddesses. Newspapers in Bengal lamented her death as the demise of a ‘mother’.120 Across towns in Bengal and India, such as Calcutta, Nashipur, Pabna, Natore, Patna, Bombay and Lahore, prayers were held for her health, and later, in her memory. Shops and other businesses were closed at Dacca, while a condolence meeting was held in Calcutta. Local elites led such services, but there was some amount of mass participation too.121 Indian nationalists did not accept so easily a foreign male sovereign. The king-emperors, who reigned when confrontations between the colonial state and middle class Indians had become more overt, never received a comparable veneration. Sukanya Banerjee and Mithi Mukherjee have shown how Indians, within the subcontinent as well as those who went to other parts of the empire in search of work or education, invoked the British monarch to demand an equal status as imperial subjects.122 The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 came in handy while challenging race discrimination. ‘Moderate’ as well as ‘Extremist’ Indian nationalist politicians, and, in the 1910s, those demanding Home Rule, invoked the monarch from divergent locations: sometimes because they reposed some faith in the British civilizing mission, at other times because they wanted to embarrass the government by pointing to the disjunctures between royal pledges of benevolence and the exploitative realities of colonialism. Many of these Western-educated middle-class politicians (often associated with fields like law, journalism and education) insisted that India should have a representative government that was responsible to the people, while operating within the framework of British constitutional monarchy. They cited royal pledges while campaigning for civil, political and juridical equality for Indians, for expanding their electoral and legislative rights, and for economic policies that would develop Indian manufacturing and commerce. They referred to royal promises while protesting police violence and excessive military expenditure,

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and for demanding greater numbers of Indians in state offices, including in the Indian Civil Service. Subversively expropriating British ideas about the supposed Indian adoration of personal monarchy (in contrast to impersonal bureaucratic administration), these Indian nationalists often argued that the colonial bureaucracy withheld from Indians the rights promised to them by the British sovereign. By demanding rights as imperial subjects rather than calling for secession from empire, they could gain the ear of liberal-radical British politicians, administrators and social reformers.123

The connections between Indian nationalism, popular imperial patriotism, liberal ideology and royalist rituals were made colourfully manifest in the celebrations organized to felicitate Dadabhai Naoroji on his return to India after he had been elected to the House of Commons on a Liberal Party ticket in 1892. Naoroji was the first person of complete Asian origin to gain such a position. He received a tremendous outburst of adulation during his India tour, manifested through congratulatory deputations by landed, commercial and professional elites as well as students, and through large public demonstrations and religious services. There is some evidence of broad-based popular participation in cities like Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Lahore, where mill-hands, artisans and shopkeepers joined in. For many Indians, it was Queen Victoria’s reign which had made possible this exceptional election; the Queen, as well as Gladstone, Naoroji’s electors and the British Empire were thus often extolled in street festoons and through portraits in Bombay and Baroda. Some of the addresses and newspaper reports compared the tour with a royal visit, while underlining its significance in showing national unity and popular will. The Kaiser-i-Hind, a Bombay newspaper, concurred with The Statesman of Calcutta that Naoroji’s tour, like A. O. Hume’s tours on behalf of the Indian National Congress, took the form of a ‘royal progress’.124 Naoroji’s ‘progress’ stood at a cusp between British royal tours and twentieth century Indian nationalist yatras. The British monarchy was fashioned into a symbol of global equality, and specifically, of the equality of all imperial subjects, in the hope that the empire could transcend its racial stratification. At the intersections of the imperial and the global, we find references in these celebrations to ‘the world’ as a category, as the British Empire was urged to be not merely a political order that almost traversed the planet, but also to provide a moral framework that rose above race hierarchies. An address sent to Naoroji from the small town of Bhusaval in Maharashtra thus thanked British

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electors for showing ‘the world that under the benign rule of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen-Empress, we, the Indian subjects, can also practically enjoy the same privileges as Her Majesty’s British-born subjects.’125

Nationalists sometimes distinguished between loyalty to the distant ‘good’ monarchs and hostility towards their ‘bad’ officers in India. When Lord Curzon was returning to India in 1904, the Bombay Municipal Corporation debated on whether to welcome him. Pherozeshah Mehta noted that Curzon could be welcomed as Viceroy, ‘as personally representing the Sovereign’, but not in his ‘administrative’ capacity as Governor-General, since he had curtailed the municipal franchise in Calcutta and Madras, and helped in: the passing of the Official Secrets Act, the Universities Act, the withdrawal of competitive tests for entrance in the Provincial Service, and above all the tampering with the declared policy of the Crown for the Government of this country, as in the time of Lord Lytton, by misconstruing the words of the Great Proclamation of 1858.

Mehta’s motion was defeated by one vote.126

Vivekananda offered an equally strategic valuation of monarchic rule. He described ‘democracy as theoretically the worst form for an imperial government to take’, since it prevented the ruler from responding ‘personally’ to the grievances of the ruled. His disciple, Sister Nivedita, observed: how hard it had been for the Indian poor to understand the transition from the personal rule of sovereigns, always accessible to appeal, always open to the impulse of mercy, and able to exercise a supreme discretion, to the cold bureaucratic methods of a series of departments.

Vivekananda mentioned to his followers about ‘innumerable simple folk’ who had used all their money in a vain effort to come to Britain to appeal to the Queen, and died of poverty ‘far from the homes and villages’.127 He argued that in an absolute and arbitrary monarchy, race difference played a negligible role in separating different categories of subjects. In contrast, where a ruling race controlled the ruler, or where the ruling nation was a republic (prajatantra), an entire race systematically oppressed another, reducing any chances of welfare-oriented rule. Hence, foreign subjects of the Roman Empire were happier under the rule of the emperors than under the republic, and

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St Paul, though a member of the conquered Jewish people, could appeal to Caesar.128 Vivekananda, an Anglicised Indian who preached about Hinduism to Western audiences, perhaps styled himself after the Romanised Jew who brought Christianity to Rome. In any case, he presented an idealised concept of monarchic rule to denounce systems of racialised domination.

Peasant communities sometimes referred to the British monarch while revolting against British and Indian elites. During the Indigo Revolt in Bengal (1859–62), peasants invoked the Queen to challenge oppressive forms of power, including extra-economic coercion, used by indigo planters. It was believed that Victoria had given cultivators the right to choose whether they wanted to grow indigo or not.129 A peasant noted: ‘If the land belonged to the Queen, and the Sahib had nothing to do with it, but only dealt with us as a mere merchant, and paid for the plant in cash right down, we should be satisfied.’130 This articulated a peasant understanding of rulership as something distinct from economic exploitation; it stands as a counter-pole to the colonial conflation of political sovereignty and economic extraction. As K. K. Sengupta has shown, comparable sensibilities about rights were visible during the peasant revolt of 1873 in the Pabna district of Bengal, when the rebels announced that they were tenants of the Queen, and would not pay rent to the zamindars. They hoped that under Crown rule, their rents would be fixed, arbitrary zamindari collections would cease, and their lands would not be forcibly taken away from them. A leader of the revolt was believed to have got lease of the country from the Queen.131 During the Deccan Riots in Bombay Presidency in 1875, peasants destroyed the debt records of moneylenders; there were rumours that the Queen herself had instructed the moneylenders to give up their bonds.132 Not all popular perceptions of the Crown were so positive. In the Munda rebellion of the late 1890s, ‘tribal’ rebels visualised Victoria as Mandodari, the demon king Ravana’s wife, since the colonial state was held responsible for brutal fiscal oppression.133 Mobs in Lahore, agitating against the Rowlatt Act in 1919, destroyed pictures of George V and Mary, crying ‘Hai Hai George mar gaya’ (Ah! Ah! George is dead).134 Ramachandra Guha has observed that in the Kumaun-Garhwal region of the Himalayan foothills in 1920-21, rebels against British forest and labour policies denounced the state as a bania (merchant) and rakshasi (demonic) raj. The British monarch was equated with Ravana since he did not help Indian petitioners.135 In the interwar years, though the British monarchy retained some appeal among ‘lower caste’ politicians (see Chapter

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4), the appeal of the colonial emperor-cult was circumscribed by imperial structures of political-economic domination and exploitation.

1.5 The ‘princely impostor’: Indian nationalist criticism of British monarchy as a fake kingship, ca. 1870–1939136 By juxtaposing perspectives from intellectual and social histories, this section presents a broader argument about Bengali criticism of the British monarchy as a fake kingship. I show how, at local government (provincial, divisional and district) levels in Bengal, royal celebrations included durbars presided over by British administrators and attended by Indian landholders of the area. Government celebrations also included speeches, distribution of honours to notables, fireworks, church services, athletic contests and illumination of streets and buildings. While some government allocations were set apart for these activities, a substantial amount of funds was raised through subscriptions from Indians. Indian notables also arranged religious processions and prayers in temples and mosques, and financed local community works, including building of schools, medical facilities, tanks and wells. They gave alms and public feasts to the poor, and occasionally remitted rents of peasants. There was a disjuncture therefore between the aspect of spectacle which was organized by the colonial state, and the aspect of benevolence, for which local Indian notables made the main contribution. In Bengal, Indian nationalist perception of colonial monarchy was predicated on this dissonance between the spectacular and the welfare-oriented aspects of kingship. Nationalist newspapers frequently denounced the British state for failing to act as a true benevolent and charitable raja, in the manner that precolonial Indian rulers or present-day native princes and landlords functioned, and for instead wasting public and private money. There was also a profound problem in terms of imperial communication, in the sense that addresses sent by Indians to British royals were filtered by the provincial and central governments before they could reach the royal family. Addresses containing political themes of a ‘controversial’ nature were excluded.137 As a Government of India official noted in 1920: All addresses should be confined to congratulatory and complimentary matter, and should exclude expressions of opinion on political questions, requests for favours, or allusions to topics of a controversial nature. In cases

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of doubt as to whether an address infringes these conditions, the local Government should refer the matter to the Government of India before giving an express or implied approval to the draft.138

Further, government programmes generally involved interactions of the royal visitors with British administrators and Indian princes and notables. But such opportunity seldom came to the middle or lower classes, a fact which many Indians bemoaned, as they suggested that a true king should mingle with the people and address their grievances.

Nabinchandra Sen had such hopes. In poems published during the 1869–70 visit of the Duke of Edinburgh (Victoria’s second son) and the 1875–76 visit of the Prince of Wales (future Edward VII), he lamented India’s cultural decline and poverty under British rule, its famines and epidemics, the heavy taxation, and the ruination of Indian manufacturing by the British cotton textile industry. He urged the princes to inform Victoria about Indian suffering so that she would alleviate her Indian children’s problems.139 Many nationalist newspapers were more bitter; they simply urged their readers not to cooperate with the state in its effort to use the tour to convince the world that Indians were happy under British rule.140 The Hindu Hitoishini mocked the way in which the state thought it necessary ‘to impress feelings of loyalty on the inhabitants of Calcutta by making proclamations to the effect ‘that they should always appear in public in decent clothes, and with cheerful faces, during the stay of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in Calcutta.’141 In the end, the prince met British and Indian dignitaries. He attended church services, a viceregal ball, the races, the theatre, sports events, and visited government institutions, but could not mix with common Indians.142 Comparable contradictions were at play in the local celebrations marking Victoria’s assumption of the imperial title. In various district headquarters towns of Bengal, the Royal Titles Act and the related Queen’s Proclamation were read in English and in the vernacular; local notables received certificates of honour; streets and buildings were lit up; some prisoners were freed; and, where troops were stationed, there were military parades and firing of salutes. Some state funds were allocated for the celebrations, but public subscriptions helped meet the bulk of the expense. Private individuals raised money for building water-supply works, bridges and town halls, and for improving educational and medical infrastructure.143 The important role of local notables, especially zamindars, sometimes led to hilarious confusion. The Magistrate-Collector

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of Murshidabad was thus ‘disconcerted, while amused, at learning last night from a silk factory gomashta that the common people believed that the whole proceedings of the day were in honour of our respected townswoman the Maharani of Cossim Bazar.’144 But the Bengali press bitterly criticised the imperial pomp and circumstance.145 The newspaper Sahachar argued that the Act aimed at countering Russia’s imperial ambitions; hence an imperial assemblage was held even as famine broke out in southern and western India, since ‘pageantry had now become essential to the continuance of the Government of India.’146 The Bharat Mihir regretted that no proclamation had been made to make ‘natives of Bengal’ eligible for seats in the British Parliament, and to ensure that there was ‘to be no invidious distinction as to laws and institutions between Englishmen and natives of India’.147 The Soma Prakash compared Lytton to the ‘tyrant’ Nero, denouncing him for wasting money while ‘thousands of men will perhaps be dying from starvation, from want of proper relief and supervision, and cattle unnumbered from want of water and fodder’. The British were accused of treating Indians ‘as a race of children fond of glitter and show’.148 This kind of criticism was cited by the government as evidence for the necessity of newspaper censorship through a Vernacular Press Act.149 Later, Bipin Chandra Pal recalled that many Indians regarded the imperial title and Lytton’s speech at the Delhi assemblage as foreboding an aggressive imperialism that repudiated the focus on racial equality embodied in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858.150

In 1887, the golden jubilee of Victoria’s reign was marked in Calcutta and in various district towns by speeches, military parades, church services, prayers in temples and mosques, sankirtana processions, fireworks and illumination. Indians raised money for educational institutions, charitable dispensaries, midwife facilities, libraries, tanks and wells, lodges and bridges. Indian elites gave money and clothes to the poor.151 From the British, Bengali nationalists wanted tax reliefs, welfare institutions and the repeal of the racially discriminatory Arms Act; they castigated the state when these demands were not met.152 Ten years later, in 1897, Victoria’s diamond jubilee was celebrated through public illuminations, church services, and prayers in temples and mosques. Indian notables gave alms and food to the poor and sponsored educational and water supply works. To help poor peasants, the ruler of Cooch Behar remitted a hundred thousand rupees of arrears of rent; he also dedicated a river bridge in the Queen’s name.153 Simultaneously, many Indians criticised the British for wasting money at a time of famine and plague.154 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.002

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Through the late-nineteenth century, the British monarchy offered a fecund field of public debate. For many Bengalis, the visual majesty of monarchy was empty of real content; British rulership was bereft of ‘love’ for Indians. The Rajshahye Samachar was typical in noting that the British ‘seem to think that, as Asiatics, we are very fond of glitter and sport; and it was only by such displays and demonstrations that the Mahomedan Emperors, though foreigners in both creed and language, succeeded in gaining the affections of natives.’ In fact Muslim emperors ‘really loved the country, nay, India was adopted as their native land; and hence it was that natives were so strongly attached to them.’155 It was again from such a critical stance that Indian nationalists blamed the British for wasting money over the 1903 coronation durbar and the building of Victoria Memorial.156 Reports came in from the districts that state authorities were forcing people to donate money, pay for fireworks and illuminate their buildings to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII, whereas the people themselves either did not want to pay or wanted their money to be used for charitable and public works. Within this context, many nationalists found Indian ideals of rule to be superior to British colonial ones.157 Sri Sri Vishnu Priya-o-Ananda Bazar Patrika, for example, criticised the state for not remitting taxes in the manner of the Indian zamindars.158 In 1905–06, the visit of the Prince of Wales (future George V) coincided with the Swadeshi upsurge of anti-colonial nationalism in India.159 In this hostile milieu, the Sandhya declared of the prince: ‘We shall honour him, but our hearts will not be filled with love and bhakti. The English sovereign cannot satisfy the cravings of loyalty in one’s mind.’160 The Daily Hitavadi suggested about royal programmes: Government apparently does not think it desirable that people should show their love to their sovereign independently of it. It therefore appears to them on such occasions, with its entire machinery of laws and regulations, swords and bayonets, and badges and red-tape to their utter bewilderment and consternation.161

The Hitavadi asked: When the occasion comes for wasting the people’s money India must act in the true fashion of an Oriental. But in other matters she is not considered as an Oriental. For what amount of revenue has been remitted, how many prisoners have been released, – in short what has the land gained by the Royal Visit?162

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The Hindi Bangavasi complained that unlike precolonial rulers, such as the Mughals, or present-day native princes, the British did not distribute food, gold, or silver among the poor.163 The Bharat Mitra wrote: ‘The King has no opportunity to hear the petitions of his subject direct, but has to hear them through his representatives who never care to report the real condition of the people.’164 The Daily Hitavadi concluded that European monarchs were not real kings, but ‘like dolls – moved by springs, worked by machine. In European countries, royalty is a thing invested with great semblance of power, but in reality without any authority to personally guide the administration of the country’. In the absence of true kingship, the authority which did exist in British India was ‘the thrust of the policeman’s baton. There were no gifts or feeding of the poor; it all ended in exhibitions of authority by the police and by the subordinate English officials’.165 The newspaper was not atypical in its attitude to British kingship. Many Bengali nationalists felt that precolonial monarchies might have embodied hierarchical forms of authority, but they at least tried to integrate the ruled into the frameworks of power through various forms of ‘love’ and acts of generosity. In contrast, colonial governance relied on rule by machinery, excluded the ruled completely from positions of decision-making, and systematically exploited the colonised society for the sole benefit of an imperial nation-state. Jon Wilson has argued that the Bengali critique of colonial governance as being mechanical in nature stemmed from colonialism’s rigid distinction between state and society, and reliance on ‘written rules, utilitarian rationality and machine-like chains of command’.166 Manu Goswami has similarly suggested that many Indian nationalists perceived Western capitalist civilization as inherently ‘mechanical’, as opposed to which they posited organicist ideas of ethical national society.167

I would argue that this critique generated new discourses on kingship as well, which sought to counter models of industrial exploitation with normative expectations of monarchic rule. Thus, while reflecting on the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1905–06, Rabindranath Tagore denied that there was any true raja in British India. Rather, British rule expressed the power of one nation over another. It was a rule by machine (kal, yantra), which governed India like a factory (shasana-karkhana) or an office (apisi-shasana), and was oppressively imposed by British traders, miners, tea planters and the cotton textile industry. Ironically enough, the British still wanted to receive devotion from Indians, as a brutal husband coerced love from a wife. Rabindranath felt that compared

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to such ‘rule by multiple kings’ (he used a neologism, bahurajakata), even rule by an individual British monarch was to be preferred, provided he governed India for the benefit of Indians and regarded the country as his native land, in the manner, for example, of the Mughals, who had placed Indians in high offices. Mirroring colonial assumptions, Rabindranath suggested that Indians desired personal rule; they sought a ‘powerful man’ (shaktiman purusha) behind manifestations of power (shaktiprakasha), one with whom they could form a bond of loving devotion (bhakti).168

Such attitudes were not exceptional to Bengal. In 1906, in response to a government directive to foster imperial patriotism and royalism among students in Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai suggested that rule by a British monarch was less harmful to Indians than rule of the British Parliament ‘representing the British nation’, given that one could sometimes ‘successfully appeal to the humanity and benevolence of individuals but to hope for justice and benevolence from a nation is hoping against hope. The rule of a foreign democracy, is, in this respect, the most dangerous’. British national interests thus always trumped Indian ones when it came to the cotton textile industry. For Rai, this was also a problem of the absent sovereign, since Indians were ‘ruled by a democracy which represents the British nation and in the appointing and controlling of which the Sovereign has really no hand.’169 Mahatma Gandhi offered comparable critiques of colonial exploitation, as exemplified in his Hind Swaraj (1909). Like Rabindranath and Lajpat Rai, he suggested in 1910 that it would be better for India to be ruled by a British king such as Edward VII than by the entire British people, since ‘the tyranny perpetrated upon a people in the name of the people’ was more dangerous than ‘the atrocities committed by one individual’. Gandhi unequivocally castigated the manner in which ‘every Englishman is ruling over you and me’.170 The Bombay Presidency politician Bal Gangadhar Tilak offered a different argumentation. In a speech in Poona in 1907 during the Swadeshi agitation, he challenged colonial arguments that Indians worshipped their rulers, including the British monarch, as divinity. He suggested that in Indian traditions, every individual, and not just the ruler, was considered a part of divinity; further, an unjust ruler was like a demon destined for hell, who deserved to be ‘forthwith replaced’. Tilak thereby justified ‘revolution’, and especially ‘an agitation by the subjects to control the power of the King’. He combined this with support for parliamentary rule where ‘the sovereign power is diffused among so many

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individuals’.171 Another such justification for regime change was offered by Tilak in 1916, during the Home Rule movement, when he argued that the ideal king of the English political tradition, who acted on his ministers’ advice, resembled the Vedantic brahman or transcendental divinity in being incapable of doing wrong. This embodied a sort of ‘invisible Government’. In contrast was the world of ‘visible Government’, of maya or illusion, of inferior deities and priests. This was comparable to the colonial administration, comprising the Secretary of State for India, the Viceroy, the governors, the collectors and the police. It was this which needed to be radically transformed by bestowing greater political and administrative rights and powers to Indians.172 For Tilak government was thus monarchic in a transcendental sense, but this monarchy had to be realised in practice through a polyarchy of administrators, none of whom could claim to be sole ruler, and all of whom had some responsibility to the governed. He mapped this through an Indian cosmology where God was one in the ultimate instance, while in the immanent world claimants to power partook only of a limited and removable divinity. Every individual was also a part of God and so a part of the cosmology of governance. Expectations from the God-King rose in the build-up to the 1911 coronation durbar of George V at Delhi. Many nationalist newspapers in Bengal expressed the hope that the King, by coming to India, would cure the people’s sufferings.173 The Pallivasi, for example, asked the King to ‘show yourself ’ to Indians, ‘applying healing balm to the wounds they bear and wipe off their tears’, and to sit ‘on the ancient and glorious throne of Delhi with gifts of peace, forgiveness, forbearance’.174 The British planned to harness Indian royalism through a pan-subcontinental network of celebrations, involving exhibitions of portraits of the King in the localities, and the reading out of the royal proclamation by the senior civil officer at the headquarters of each local government, district, subdivision, taluk and tehsil, and by the patwari or village headman in the villages. Indians were requested to feed the poor, organize sports events and fireworks, and illumine their houses and business premises.175 When the King announced the annulment of the Partition of Bengal at the Delhi durbar, Indian nationalist newspapers in Bengal reacted with royalist jubilation, attributing this act to the grace of the monarch rather than to the policies of colonial officials. They generally ignored the announcement of the transfer of the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi, or even welcomed the expected relief from the Viceroy’s proximity. They criticised the European press

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in Bengal for their ‘disloyalty’ to the King, when the Europeans condemned the transfer of capital as a move that would weaken their economic and political influence. Many Indian newspapers felt that the King showed uncommon kindness and sympathy towards Indians.176 The Nayak thus called George V ‘the king of our hearts’, referring to him in a purple headline as ‘The Lord of Delhi or the Lord of the World’.177 Several newspapers, including for example the Dainik Chandrika, published acclamations of victory to the KingEmperor.178 The Basumati addressed the King, writing that he had ‘conquered the hearts of the Indians’. Indians worshipped him ‘with the flower of loyalty’, since ‘you love your subjects, and to please your subjects is your religion’.179 It compared the durbar to the Rajasuya sacrifice of the mythic king Yudhishthira. George V was described as a ‘mighty Sovereign’, a model successor to the legendary kings Prthu, Bharata, Harishchandra and Vikramaditya, and the Mughal rulers Akbar and Jahangir.180 The Bangavasi exulted: ‘To an Indian the Sovereign is an incarnation of God the sight of whom gives one great religious merit.’181 The Marwari, comparing the royal visit to the reigns of Rama and Yudhishthira, commented: ‘Your Majesty, we regard you like a deity. We are old-fashioned people, and our scriptures say that the king is a manifestation of God Himself.’182 The Indian Mirror noted the significance of the royal advent in the Christmas season: Not a man, woman or child but feels the possession of something this season which it is impossible to compute in words. The spirit of Christ – the spirit of love, peace and good-will – is on the face of the land; and it is Royal presence that has brought this about.183

The Nayak referred to the King as ‘an incarnation of Vishnu’, and compared the royal couple to Rama and Sita and the gods Shiva and Durga.184 It suggested that ‘Royalty is to Hindus akin to divinity’.185 We get a sense of the political rationale behind this ecstatic emperor-worship from one of its reports: We are seekers of sweet words and sweet treatment. And have you, o KingEmperor! given us anything more than sweet words and sweet treatment? As a constitutional monarch, you cannot give jaigirs, remit revenues or scatter coins among your subjects like the Musalman emperors of old, so that you have failed to appear amongst us according to our old ideal of sovereignty. But still we have become your slaves, given you the place of a God and worshipped you as such. Why? Because from your sweet words

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and sweet treatment accorded to us for a few days we have understood that had you but the power you would have removed all our sorrows, that in spite of our being a fallen, conquered people you consider us not as cats and dogs but as men, and that you are proud of having us as your subjects. Unfortunately, the people who govern India in your name cannot and do not care to understand this. Many of them treat us very rudely, apply very hard words to us and kick our poor coolies out of their lives. If your sacred contact teaches them to speak sweetly and behave sweetly towards us, many of our sorrows will be removed. If your visit leads to their treating Indians as men, the causes of many of our complaints will be removed.186

The advent of George V thus appeared to many nationalists as a full presence – a parousia – of divine kingship, when popular welfare, godhood and human rulership were fused in a moment of epiphany. In these eulogies one observes a momentary resolution, or at least a sacramental interruption, of the problem of colonial semiotics, the bridging of the gap between the promise and the reality, the signifier and the signified, with respect to ideal rulership. The Indian rhetoric about divine kingship did not represent an uncritical faith in British royal benevolence; rather it articulated the hope that the colonial state should from now onwards act as a genuine moral ruler in its dealings with the Indian people.

In contrast, Indian nationalists boycotted the 1921–22 visit to India of the Prince of Wales (future Edward VIII), which coincided with the anti-colonial Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements. Gandhi advocated the boycott to challenge the legitimacy of colonial rule. He urged the British to address Indian grievances about colonial atrocities in Punjab, as well as to rethink their policies towards the Ottoman Empire, considered by many Sunni Muslims as the seat of the Caliphate.187 The state made extensive police arrangements across India to protect the prince from agitators.188 In Bengal, the visit was marked by fireworks and illuminations, levees, military pageantry, dances, lunches at clubs, and races. Government reports however suggested that the ‘general attitude in the mufassil has been one of indifference. Several districts report that an idea was prevalent that the visit would do something to forward swaraj and that its failure, so far, in this respect, has been a disappointment’. Many Indians criticised the expenses involved, refused to join in the celebrations, and kept their shops closed. Rather than the prince, it was Gandhi who was often acclaimed: with shouts of Gandhi Maharaj ki jai (Victory to Great King Gandhi!).189 Nationalist newspapers often noted that Indians did not dislike

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the prince, but they opposed the way in which the British ‘bureaucracy’ used him; hence they supported the boycott.190 The Amrita Bazar Patrika felt that the Indians who would welcome the prince would only do so out of affection for Queen Victoria.191 The Indian Mirror reported that people would now cease to respect the state, and instead would acclaim Gandhi Maharaj.192 Still the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal wrote to the Government of India that ‘those who support the Government have been greatly encouraged by the visit of His Royal Highness and feel that it has served to measure the failure of the non-co-operation movement.’193 However Lord Lytton, the Governor of Bengal, argued that this report was ‘very misleading’. The news had been passed to England that the visit had been a success, when in reality ‘such was far from being the case’. The prince was in a ‘very depressed state of mind owing to the bad reception he had received’, and ‘wrote a most depressed letter home from Calcutta’. Official information to the Secretary of State reported ‘unqualified success’, whereas ‘private information tells of failure and disappointment’.194

In interwar Bengal, Indian newspapers seldom openly attacked British kings and princes, but used royal events to articulate nationalist demands and anxieties. Thus, during the Silver Jubilee celebrations of George V in 1935, they appealed for release of Indian political prisoners.195 The Mohammadi criticised government instruction to mosques to offer jubilee prayers, while the Mojahed condemned the British for killing forty Muslims at Karachi.196 The Naya Bangla criticised the financial extortion of villagers in relation to the jubilee festivities.197 Socialism-inflected discourses also challenged royal celebrations. The Nagarik thus commented: If looking at this illuminated city you are led to think of the darkened homes of the jute-mill workers and when reflecting on the fireworks on the occasion you are led to think of the starving peasantry of Bengal, the fault must be due to your sentimentality.198

Later, in 1936, Indians expressed grief at the death of George V, while condemning the British government.199 In 1936–37, Indian newspapers discussed as to how the British intended to celebrate the coronations of Edward VIII and George VI, and whether there might again be coronation durbars.200 The Ananda Bazar Patrika condemned such celebrations as similar to those of ‘autocratic monarchs of the middle ages’, 201 while the Amrita Bazar Patrika

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dismissed them as ‘a very crude way of capturing the imagination of the vulgar’ in the attempt to divert people away from Congress nationalism. It pleaded for release of political prisoners, and for building of hospitals, leper asylums and poor houses.202

Indian nationalists also often resorted to transimperial and transnational comparisons, to portray the British as ‘tyrants’ similar to eighteenth century French monarchs, to Habsburg rulers of Italy and to Russian Tsars. They identified themselves with French revolutionaries, with Mazzini and Garibaldi and with Russians rebels. 203 In culmination of this long-term tendency to denounce monarchically-legitimated authoritarian rule, radical nationalists gradually veered to supporting full independence for India rather than Dominion status within a monarchic framework of empire: a landmark moment was the declaration of purna swaraj (literally, complete self-rule) by the Indian National Congress in 1930. In the following years, Indian political leaders sometimes invoked the Crown, but mainly aimed at asserting Indian autonomy while flexibly redefining the British Empire.204 India’s independence in 1947 eventually contributed to a metamorphosis of the Commonwealth: after 1949, republics could become its members, and the British monarch became a symbolic head of the association. India could thus become a republic (in 1950) and yet remain within the Commonwealth.205

1.6 Conclusion Many British officials, politicians and intellectuals used monarchic concepts to represent an emerging order of state ‘sovereignty’ in India, and as a symbol of the forces of ‘improvement’ (John Stuart Mill), ‘progress’ (Mill and Curzon), ‘civilization’ (Robert Lowe), ‘modern ideas’ (Alfred Lyall) and ‘modern history’ (Curzon). This political metaphysics interpreted modernity as a force providentially and rationally re-ordering a backward society from above; in this vein, the plenitude of colonial state power was also articulated through a claim of ersatz godhood. The monarch invoked in British discourses was not merely an icon of British power, but a cipher for the imperiousness of modernity. Simultaneously, imperial voices masked the governmental processes of ‘modernity’ through the rhetoric of personal kingship, creating a dichotomy between advanced Britain which supposedly understood impersonal governance and backward India which could not.

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These discourses were part of a global discursive sphere; British administrators thus referred to monarchic rulerships in Europe and Asia to conceptualise the need for authoritarian governance in India. Discussions on India left a trace on British politicians and intellectuals, especially in producing British (and more tortuously, European or white) self-identification as a people deserving of liberty and constitutional rule, in contrast to non-Europeans who needed more despotic forms of government. Monarchic ideas were used by the British in South Asia to justify revenue maximisation, the introduction of elite-oriented legal and property codes, and the overall superiority of the colonising state over the colonised. However, such authoritarian articulations did not go unchallenged; some British politicians and administrators critically questioned the language of colonial despotism. This tendency heightened in the early-twentieth century in tandem with the growth of anti-colonial Indian nationalist politics and eventually facilitated British discussions on devolution of governmental power to Indians. Indian nationalists often read the imperial monarchy as a fake kingship that disguised diverse economic and racialised processes of exploitation and subordination. They sometimes upheld the idea of one-man rule as a better alternative to the impersonal governance of one nation by another. At other times, they denounced the very idea of monarchically-legitimated authoritarian governance. Some Indians referred to the transcontinental sway of the British monarchy to argue for racial equality among all subjects of the Crown. Others invoked the Crown to critique local British and Indian elites. From the perspective of the colonised, colonial spectacles of kingship however often appeared as instances of frozen ritual, almost hermetically sealed in a world of static symbols. British kingship seemed dependent on theatrical episodes, rather than on any continuous structure of welfare-oriented (tax-remitting or largesse-distributing) beneficence. To many Indians it seemed that colonial governance created an anarchic universe bereft of any foundational relationship between signifier and signified with respect to the idea and the practice of benevolent kingship. Monarchic reason appeared as an agent of violence and indifference which seductively brutalised Indians by offering mirages of protection and welfare. Imperial propaganda ultimately threw into bold relief the dilemmas accompanying any construction of modern state sovereignty which was conceptually embedded in a translation of the theological into the political.

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Endnotes 1 Paramananda, Sivabharata; Laine, Shivaji. 2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9

Fenech, Darbar; Rinehart, Dasam Granth; Purnima Dhavan, When Sparrows became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; Louis E. Fenech, The Sikh Zafar-Namah of Guru Gobind Singh: A Discursive Blade in the Heart of the Mughal Empire, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Banerjee, ‘State of Nature, Civilized Society, and Social Contract’; Milinda Banerjee, ‘“All This is Indeed Brahman”: Rammohun Roy and a “Global” History of the Rights-Bearing Self ’, The Asian Review of World Histories 3(1) 2015: 81–112; Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gita Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der Frühen Neuzeit (1500–1750). Studien zu einer interkulturellen Konstellation, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994; Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 6–15; Travers, Ideology and Empire; Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tillmann W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Dirks, Scandal; Sunil Agnani, ‘Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke’, Cultural Critique 68(Winter) 2008: 131–62. Edmund Burke (1729– 97) was a British Whig politician and intellectual, remembered for his critique of the French Revolution. Warren Hastings (1732–1818) was a British administrator in India and the first Governor-General there (1774–85). Frederick G. Whelan, ‘Oriental Despotism: Anquetil-Duperron’s Response to Montesquieu’, History of Political Thought 22(4) (Winter) 2001: 619–47. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) was a French Orientalist.

Gita Dharampal-Frick, ‘Castigating Company Raj: Georg Forster and Matthias Sprengel on British Colonialism (1781–1802)’, in Sonderdruck aus Barrieren und Zugänge: Die Geschichte der Europäischen Expansion, edited by Thomas Beck, Marilia dos Santos Lopes and Christian Rödel,Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, 195–207. Jean Law de Lauriston, Mémoire sur Quelques Affaires de l’Empire Mogol, 1756–1761, Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies françaises, 1913, 85, 108. Jean Law was later Governor of French India (1764–77).

10 Sushil Chaudhury, ‘Nawab Sirajuddaula and Battle of Palashi’ in History of Bangladesh, 1704–1971, Vol. 1, Political History, edited by Sirajul Islam, Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1992, 110–11. Also Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal, Delhi: Manohar, 1995.

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11 Letter from Raymond to William Armstrong, 15 May 1790, in ‘Nota Manus’ (trans.), Syed Gholam Hossein Khan, Sëir-Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times, Calcutta, 1902, vol. 4, Appendix, 19. Khan was an Iranian-origin Nawabi administrator. The translation was made by Raymond (Nota Manus) in the 1780s. 12 Syed Gholam Hossein Khan, Sëir-Mutaqherin, vol. 2, 196.

13 Raymond to Armstrong, in Sëir-Mutaqherin, vol. 4, Appendix, 11, 17.

14 Ibid., 18–26; ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Syed Gholam Hossein Khan, Sëir-Mutaqherin, vol. 1, 6.

15 See Rajiblochan Mukhopadhyay’s Maharaj Krishnachandra Rayasya Charitram and Mrityunjay Vidyalankar’s Rajabali, analysed in Chatterjee, Cultures of History, and Banerjee, ‘State of Nature, Civilized Society, and Social Contract’. 16 Voltaire, Fragments sur l’Inde, sur le General Lalli, et sur le Comte de Morangiés, 1773, 55. 17 Voltaire, Essay Sur L’histoire Générale, et Sur les Mœurs et L’esprit des Nations, Depuis Charlemagne Jusqu' à Nos Jours, vol. 4, 1757, 306–9 (quote from 309). 18 Bayly, Imperial Meridian; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 19 See, for example, David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson (eds.), The French Revolution in Global Perspective, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. 20 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, London: A. Strahan, 1825 (1765), 160. 21 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 22 John Bruce, Historical View of Plans, for the Government of British India, and Regulation of Trade to the East Indies, London, 1793, 346. 23 Letter excerpted in H. T. Colebrooke, ‘The Preface’ (1796) in A Digest of Hindu Law, on Contracts and Successions, vol. 1, Madras: J. Higginbotham, 1864 (1801), vii–xi. William Jones (1746–94) was a British Orientalist who is remembered for his discovery of the common origin of the Indo-European languages. Jones was later himself depicted as the Justinian of India in a marble monument in Oxford. 24 Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990; Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’, in Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 57–75; David Washbrook, ‘From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-history of Modernity’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40(4) 1997: 410–43; Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; Kolff, Naukar; Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006;

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‘Caesar of India’ 95 Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr. and Jayanth K. Krishnan (eds.), Hinduism and Law: An Introduction, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Gita DharampalFrick, ‘Interrogating the Historical Discourse on Caste and Race in India’, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Paper, 2013. 25 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 8–9; also Sebastian Meurer, ‘Corruption, Crown Influence, and Viceregal Splendour: Reverse Legacies of the Age of Reform in Britain and British India’, paper presented at conference ‘The Making of a Monarchy for the Modern World’, Kensington Palace, London, June 2012. 26 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 111. Wellesley (1760–1842) was Governor-General in India from 1798 to 1805.

27 Rammohun Roy (1772/4–1833) founded the reformist Brahmo religious movement and successfully agitated for the abolition of suttee. See Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 42–60; Banerjee, ‘All This is Indeed Brahman’. 28 Dirks, Scandal, 172. 29 See the study of Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone in Martha McLaren, ‘From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in Early Nineteenth-Century British India’, The International History Review 15(3) 1993: 469–501. 30 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 81–139. James Mill (1773–1836) was a British philosopher. He was for a significant time in the employ of the English East India Company. 31 Testimony of James Mill, 2 August 1831, House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter HCPP), 1831, Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, with an Appendix of Accounts and Papers, and an Index to the Evidence, 292. 32 James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1, London: James Madden and Co., 1840, 306. 33 Ibid., 322. See also Inden, Imagining India, 168–69. 34 See Section I of the ‘Introduction’ of this book. 35 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982. 36 F. W. Buckler, ‘The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fourth Series) 5, 1922: 71–100; Douglas Dewar, H. L. Garrett and F. W. Buckler, ‘The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny: A Reply and with a Rejoinder’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fourth Series) 7, 1924: 131–65; John S. Deyell and R. E. Frykenberg, ‘Sovereignty and the “Sikka” under Company Raj: Minting Prerogative and Imperial Legitimacy in India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 19(1) 1982: 1–25; Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, 353–534; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 37 HCPP, 1859, session 1, vol. 18, ‘East India (King of Delhi). Copy of the Evidence taken before the Court Appointed for the Trial of the King of Delhi’, 2.

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96

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38 Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India (Published by the Governor-General at Allahabad, November 1st, 1858); see also Miles Taylor, ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–61’, Victorian Studies 46(2) 2004: 264–74. 39 L. A. Knight, ‘The Royal Titles Act and India’, The Historical Journal 11(3) 1968: 488–507. Disraeli (1804–81), a British Conservative statesman, served as Prime Minister in 1868, and from 1874 to 1880.

40 Mr Disraeli, 17 February 1876, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 227, 1876, 409–10. 41 Mr Grantham, 11 May 1876, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 229, 1876, 427–28.

42 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 227, 1876, House of Commons: Mr Lowe, 17 February, 411–17; Sir George Bowyer, 17 February, 418–20; Mr W. E. Forster, 17 February, 420–22; Mr Disraeli, 9 March, 1719–27; Mr Samuelson, 9 March, 1729–30.

43 Mr Lowe, 17 February 1876, in ibid., 413–14. Lowe (1811–92) was a Liberal politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1868–73) and Home Secretary (1873–74) of Britain. 44 Mr Percy Wyndham, 17 February 1876, in ibid,, 428. Wyndham (1835–1911) was a Conservative politician. 45 Mr Percy Wyndham, 9 March 1876, in ibid., 1736. 46 Mr Disraeli, 9 March 1876, in ibid., 1721.

47 Mr Gladstone, 9 March 1876, in ibid., 1742. William Gladstone (1809–98) was a Liberal politician, who served several times as Prime Minister of Britain (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94). 48 Ibid., 1736–37.

49 On localisation: Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 229, 1876, House of Commons, 370–474.

50 E.g. Mr. Samuelson, 9 March 1876, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 227, 1876, 1728–29.

51 David Cannadine argues that the modern ideal of constitutional monarchy took final shape in Britain only in the late nineteenth century: ‘When did the British Monarchy become a Constitutional Monarchy?’, Lecture at Conference ‘The Making of a Monarchy for the Modern World’, Kensington Palace, London, 6 June 2012. 52 The Chancellor of the Exchequer, 9 March 1876, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 227, 1876, 1749–52. 53

Mr Disraeli, 23 March 1876, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 228, 1876, 500–1.

54 G. W. Leitner, Kaisar-i-Hind: The Only Appropriate Translation of the Title of Empress of India, Lahore: I. P. O Press, 1876. G. W. Leitner (1840–99) was an Orientalist and educationist in India.

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‘Caesar of India’ 97 55

Letter from Lord Lytton to Lord Salisbury, 30 July 1876, Lytton Collection. Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1831–91) served as Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880.

56 George Birdwood, in Leitner, Kaisar-i-Hind, 9–10. Birdwood (1832–1917) was a British administrator and scholar.

57 The Second Anglo-Afghan War would commence in 1878. On British panic about pro-Russian rumours among Indians: HCPP. East India (Native Press). Copy of Correspondence between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India on the Subject of Act IX of 1878, ‘An Act for the better Control of Publications in Oriental Languages’, 1878, 25, 39, 54–55. 58 On nineteenth century Arabic language use of the terms qaysar and inbaratur or imbaratur (imperator) to refer to European emperors: Ami Ayalon, ‘Malik in Modern Middle Eastern Titulature’, Die Welt des Islams 23–24, 1984: 313–14.

59 Lord George Hamilton, 1 March 1877, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 232, 1211–12. George Hamilton (1845–1927) was a Conservative politician who served as Under-Secretary of State for India (1874–88) and Secretary of State for India (1900–03). 60 Charles Lewis Tupper, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and its Indian Feudatories, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893, 129. Charles Lewis Tupper (1848–1910) was a member of the Indian Civil Service. 61

G. B. Malleson, Akbar, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890, 194. G. B. Malleson (1825– 98) was a British officer who served in India and is remembered for his writings on the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

62 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream, and Other Poems, New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892, 23–46. Tennyson (1809–92) was a British poet who also served as Poet Laureate.

63 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867 (1859), 6. John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was a British political philosopher and economist. On Mill, see Robert Kurfirst, ‘J. S. Mill on Oriental Despotism, Including its British Variant’, Utilitas 8(1) 1996: 73–87. 64 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, New York: Holt and Williams, 1873, 28. Stephen was a liberal and Utilitarian thinker; he was Law Member in the Viceroy’s Council in India from 1869 to 1872.

65 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 287–309.

66 Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1895, 398–99.

67 The Gazette of India, Extraordinary, Camp Delhi, 1 January 1877; Cohn, ‘Representing Authority’, 206.

68 Betty Balfour, The History of Lord Lytton’s Indian Administration, 1876 to 1880, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899, 109–10.

69 John McLeod, ‘The English Honours System in Princely India, 1925–1947’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Third Series, 4(2) 1994: 237–49; Roper Lethbridge, The Golden Book of India, London: Macmillan and Co., 1893, x–xv.

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70 John McLeod, ‘Without Precedent: The Sinha Peerage Case’, Southeast Review of Asian Studies 19, 1997: 13–30; Jesse S. Palsetia, ‘‘‘Honourable Machinations”: The Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy Baronetcy and the Indian Response to the Honours System in India’, South Asia Research 23(1) 2003: 55–75.

71 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Rajput Ceremonial Interactions as a Mirror of a Dying Indian State System, 1820–1947’, Modern Asian Studies 24(3) 1990: 459–92; Dick Kooiman, ‘The Guns of Travancore or How Much Powder May a Maharaja Blaze Away?’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 43(3) 2006: 301–22; Dick Kooiman, ‘Invention of Tradition in Travancore: A Maharaja’s Quest for Political Security’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Third Series 15(2) 2005: 151–64; Dick Kooiman, ‘Meeting at the Threshold, at the Edge of the Carpet or Somewhere in Between? Questions of Ceremonial in Princely India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 40(3) 2003: 311–33. 72 Letter from L. W. Dane, Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, to the Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, in Political Department, Confidential, Government of Bengal, File No. 52, Sl Nos. 1–8, 1904, ‘Use by the Native Chiefs and Notables of Badges and Emblems of Royalty’.

73 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’, in The Jungle Book, New York: The Century Co., 1899 (1894), 299–300. Kipling (1865–1936) was a British litterateur who received the Nobel Prize in 1907.

74 Frank M. Turner, ‘British Politics and the Demise of the Roman Republic: 1700– 1939’, The Historical Journal 29(3) 1986: 577–99.

75 Duncan Bell, ‘From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought’, The Historical Journal 49(3) 2006: 735–59. On British imperial citations of Rome, see Raymond F. Betts, ‘The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Victorian Studies 15(2) 1971: 149–59; Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; Catharine Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Mark Bradley (ed.), Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Edith Hall and Phiroze Vasunia (eds.), India, Greece, and Rome, 1757 to 2007, London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2010; Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; C. A. Hagerman, Britain’s Imperial Muse: The Classics, Imperialism, and the Indian Empire, 1784–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Greater than Rome: Neubestimmungen britischer Imperialität 1870–1914, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2015. 76 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 57–58. Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Lord Dufferin (1826–1902) was Viceroy of India from 1884 to 1888. 77 Lord Curzon, The Place of India in the Empire, London: John Murray, 1909, 10. George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925) was Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905.

78 Lord Curzon, Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from his Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 1898–1905, London: Macmillan and Co., 1906, 290–91. 79 Ibid., 308–9.

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‘Caesar of India’ 99 80 Ibid., 305. 81 Ibid., 533.

82 Ibid., 5, 229, 291.

83 J. Athelstane Baines, ‘Under the Crown’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 74(8) 1911: 796. J. A. Baines (1847–1925) was a member of the Indian Civil Service and served as the Census Commissioner of India.

84 Theodore Morison, Imperial Rule in India: Being an Examination of the Principles Proper to the Government of Dependencies, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1899, 50. Morison (1863–1936) served as an educationist in India, and was a member of the Councils of the Viceroy and of the Secretary of State for India. See also Francis G. Hutchins, The lllusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967, 158–62. 85 Morison, Imperial Rule, 135–37. 86 Ibid., 2–3. 87 Ibid., 7–8.

88 Ibid., 29–31.

89 Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 90 Curzon, Lord Curzon, 526.

91 Robert Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

92 Bernard Holland, Imperium et Libertas: A Study in History and Politics, London: Edward Arnold, 1901, 317–18.

93 David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, London: Jonathan Cape, 1977, 774. Cannadine, ‘Performance’, 152, cites these lines to discuss the ‘idea of the monarchy as secular religion’. Ramsay Macdonald (1866–1937) was the first British Prime Minister from the Labour Party, occupying this office in 1924, and from 1929 to 1935.

94 Minute of Sir Bartle Frere, 1860, cited in HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 51. Bartle Frere (1815– 1884) was a British colonial administrator who became a member of the Viceroy’s Council in 1859, and was appointed Governor of Bombay in 1862. 95 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 57–58.

96 John Morley (1838–1923) was a Liberal politician who served as Secretary of State for India (1905–11). Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, Earl of Minto (1845–1914) was Viceroy of India from 1905 to 1910.

97 Letter from D. H. R. Twomby, Commissioner, Mandalay Division to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Burma, 23 January 1908, in HCPP. East India (Advisory and Legislative Councils, &c.) Vol. II, Part II, Replies of the Local Governments, &c. 98 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 63. Edwin Samuel Montagu (1879–1924) was a Liberal politician

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100

The Mortal God who was Secretary of State for India from 1917 to 1922. Frederic John Napier Thesiger, Viscount Chelmsford (1868–1933), was Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921.

99 Ibid., 69. 100 Ibid., 5.

101 The remark is cited in the Memorandum by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, 16 November 1933, in HCPP. Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform (session 1932– 33), Vol. I. Report.

102 Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India: From 600 BC to the Muhammadan Conquest, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914, 5–6, 477–78. Smith (1848–1920) was a civilian and a historian of ancient India. 103 Vincent A. Smith, Indian Constitutional Reform Viewed in the Light of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919, 91. 104 Ibid., 21.

105 Ibid., 100–1.

106 Kelly D. Alley, ‘Gandhiji on the Central Vista: A Postcolonial Refiguring’, Modern Asian Studies 31(4) 1997: 967–94. 107 ‘Durbar Hall’, available at: http://rashtrapatisachivalaya.gov.in/rbtour/circuit-1/ durbar-hall, accessed on 20 September 2016. 108 On the problem of the empty throne, I draw on Agamben, Kingdom.

109 As typical examples of such visions of Bengali rulership, see: Girishchandra Lahiri, Pratahsmaraniya Maharani Sharatsundarir Jivanacharita, Calcutta: Sanyal and Co., 1894; Biharilal Sarkar, Maharani Svarnamayi arthat MurshidabadKashimbazarer Svargiya Maharani Svarnamayir Jivani, Calcutta: Natabar Chakravarti, 1907; Benimadhub Chatterji, A Short Sketch of Maharaja Sukhmoy Roy Bahadur and His Family, Calcutta: The Star Printing Works,1929; Jagadishchandra Bhattacharya, Maharaja Manindrachandra (Maharaja Sir Manindrachandra Nandi Bahadurer Jivani), Dacca: Jagadishchandra Bhattacharya, 1930; Sabitriprasanna Chattopadhyay, Maharaj Manindrachandra, Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyay and Sons, 1933. On landed magnates outside Bengal, see, for example, P. J. Musgrave, ‘Landlords and Lords of the Land: Estate Management and Social Control in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1920’, Modern Asian Studies 6(3) 1972: 257–75; Christopher Baker, ‘Tamilnad Estates in the Twentieth Century’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 13(1) 1976: 1–44; Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979; Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 28(2) 1986: 307–33; Stephen Henningham, A Great Estate and its Landlords in Colonial India: Darbhanga 1860–1942, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990; Price, Kingship; Benjamin B. Cohen, Kingship and Colonialism in India’s Deccan: 1850–1948, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 110 On the shifting political economy of Bengal, see: Nilmani Mukherjee, A Bengal Zamindar: Jaykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarpara and His Times, 1808–1888, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1975; Ratna Ray and Rajat Ray, ‘Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of

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‘Caesar of India’ 101 Rural Politics in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 9(1) 1975: 81–102; Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976; Partha Chatterjee, Bengal 1920– 1947: The Land Question, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1984; Somendra Chandra Nandy, History of the Cossimbazar Raj in the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Dev-All, 1986; Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920–1947, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992; John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Chitta Panda, The Decline of the Bengal Zamindars: Midnapore, 1870–1920, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996; Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005; Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

111 Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Victoria Samrajyan, or Sanskrit Stanzas (with a Translation) on the Various Dependencies of the British Crown, Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1876; Victoria-Giti-Mala, or A Brief History of England in Bengali Verses, Calcutta: Punchanun Mookerjee, 1877; Hindu Loyalty: A Presentation of the Views and Opinions of the Sanskrit Authorities on the Subject of Loyalty, Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1883; The Orders of Knighthood, British and Foreign, with a Brief Review of the Titles of Rank and Merit in Ancient Hindusthan, Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1883; Charles Capwell, ‘Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the National Anthem Project’, Ethnomusicology 31(3) 1987: 407–30; Charles Capwell, ‘A Ragamala for the Empress’, Ethnomusicology 46(2) 2002: 197–225. Tagore was the founder of the Bengal Music School, and advocated classicist traditions in Indian music. 112 Dinabandhu Chatterjee, A Short Sketch of Rajah Rajendro Mullick Bahadur and his Family, Calcutta: Kumar Nogendro Mullick, 1917, 59–60.

113 Manmatha Nath Ray Chowdhury, The Royal Visit to Calcutta: 1905, Calcutta: Rai H. N. Ghosh, 1909, 103. 114 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 August 1921, RNPB.

115 Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Birth of Hindi Drama in Banaras, 1868–1885’, in Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980, edited by Sandria B. Freitag, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 79–80. Bhartendu Harishchandra (1850–85) was a celebrated Hindi litterateur. On similar texts in Tamil and Telugu, see: Kamil Veith Zvelebil, Tamil Literature,Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974, 204; Joanne Punzo Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes: Re-visioning Kingship and Divinity in England’s India, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 34; Stuart Blackburn, ‘Life Histories as Narrative Strategy: Prophecy, Song, and Truth-Telling in Tamil Tales and Legends’, in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, edited by David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, 207; R. M. Challe, ‘Biography (Telugu)’, in Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, edited by Amaresh Datta, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1987, 543; B. Radhakrishna, Paravastu Chinnaya Suri, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995, 11.

116 See, for example: Tagore, Victoria Samrajyan; Tagore, Victoria-Giti-Mala; Gopal

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102

The Mortal God Chundra Mookhopadhyaya, Victoria-Rajasuya arthat Great Britainer Mahamanya Adhirajni Kartrk Dillir Rajasuya Samitite Bharateshvari Upadhi Dharaner Itivrtta, Calcutta: Shrishchandra Bhattacharya, 1879; Taraknath Biswas, Maharajni Victoria Charita, Calcutta: Adarini Karyalaya, 1885; Ambika Charan Gupta, Maharani Victoria ba Sukharajya, Calcutta: Srinath Misra, 1885; Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Hiraka-Jubilee (Victoria Mahotsava)’, 1898, and ‘Ashru-dhara (Victoria Viyoge Rupaka-natya)’, 1901, in Girisha-granthavali, vol. 8, Calcutta: Surendranath Ghosh, 1930, 227–38, 260–69; Krishnakumar Mitra, Victoria-Charita, Calcutta: City Book Society, 1898; Rajnarayan Das, Adarsha Ramani Maharani Victoria, Calcutta: Hare Press, 1899; Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay, Bhutapurva Bharateshvari Victoria Bharati (Kavya), Calcutta: Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay, 1913; Krishnakumar Mitra, Raja Saptam Edward, Calcutta: Sanjivani Karyalaya, 1901; Krishnakumar Mitra, Rani Alexandra, Calcutta: Sanjivani Karyalaya, 1901; Tarini Prasad Jyotishi, Pancham Georger Simhasanarohana (Ananda-Kavya), Howrah: Surendranath Guha, 1911; Baidyanath Mukhopadhyay, Samrat Pancham George o Samrajni Maryr Jivana-Charita, Gobindapur: Baidyanath Mukhopadhyay, 1912; Dineshchandra Sen, Samrat o Samrat-Mahishir Bharata-Paridarshana, Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri and Co., n.d.

117 Mukhopadhyay, Victoria-Rajasuya, 10. 118 Sen, Bharata-Paridarshana, ‘Bhumika’.

119 Ghosh, ‘Hiraka-Jubilee’, 237–38. Ghosh (1844–1912) was a playwright and theatre director from Bengal. 120 RNPB January–February 1901.

121 RNPB 1901: Bangavasi, 26 January; Dacca Gazette, 28 January; Bangavasi, 2 February. 122 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010; Mukherjee, India in Shadows.

123 See for example: The First Indian Member of the Imperial Parliament, Being a Collection of the Main Incidents Relating to the Election of Mr Dadabhai Naoroji to Parliament, Madras: Addison and Co., 1892, 27, 36, 60–61, 70, 79–81; Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1901, v, 94, 293, 484, 493–503, 509–11, 521, 634, 640, 653–57; Romesh Dutt, Indian Famines: Their Causes and Prevention, London: P. S. King and Son, 1901, 13–14; Pherozeshah Mehta, Speeches and Writings, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1905, 26, 28, 150–51, 163, 180–81, 285, 325, 814–16, 825–26; B. C. Pal, Speeches of Srj. B. C. Pal Delivered at Madras, Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1907, 10–11; Lala Lajpat Rai, The Man in His Word, Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1907, 19; Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age: From the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Commencement of the Twentieth Century, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1908, 231–35, 240; Surendranath Banerjea, Speeches and Writings, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., n.d., 67, 72, 109–10, 119, 232–38, 256–61, 315, 382, 386, 425–28; G. K. Gokhale, Speeches, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., n.d., 148, 150, 467–68, 499–501, 676–78, 710; Amvika Charan Mazumdar, Indian National Evolution: A Brief Survey of the Origin and Progress of the Indian National Congress and the Growth of Indian Nationalism, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co.,

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‘Caesar of India’ 103 1917, 11, 25–26, 228–30, 243–44, 350–51, 370, 428–29; Dadabhai Naoroji, Speeches and Writings, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., n.d., 2–3, 6–7, 69–71, 148, 178, 211, 229, 243–44, 249, 254, 269–72, 471, 529, 673–77; Pherozeshah Mehta, Some Unpublished and Later Speeches and Writings, Bombay: The Commercial Press, 1918, 7–8, 32, 40, 97, 106, 107, 114, 153–62, 277–78, 299–304, 416–21; Lord Sinha, Speeches and Writings, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1919, part I, 212–13, part II, 46; Bal Gangadhar Tilak, His Writings and Speeches, Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1922, 44, 62, 87, 149, 294–95; Rash Behari Ghose, Speeches and Writings, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., n.d., 18–20, 75–77, 105, 178–79; Chitta Ranjan Das, India for Indians, Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1921, 21, 35–37; Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) vol. 3, Delhi: Government of India, 1960, 377–78; vol. 5, Delhi: Government of India, 1994, 326, 330; vol. 11, Delhi: Government of India, 1994, 111–14.

124 India and Mr Dadabhai: An Account of the Demonstrations Held in his Honour as M.P. for Central Finsbury during his Visit to India for the Purpose of Presiding at the Ninth Indian National Congress, Lahore, December 1893 – January 1894, Bombay: The Commercial Press, 1898 (‘royal progress’ quote from 386–88). Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) was a Moderate nationalist leader. A. O. Hume (1829–1912) was a British civil servant who helped found the Indian National Congress. 125 Ibid., 560.

126 Mehta, Unpublished, 124–26. Pherozeshah Mehta (1845–1915) was a Moderate nationalist from Bombay.

127 Nivedita, ‘The Master as I Saw Him’ (first published from 1906, and later as a book in 1910), in The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, vol. 1, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2006, 71. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) was a Bengali Hindu religious reformer, monk, and Indian nationalist. Sister Nivedita (1867–1911) was an Irish-origin disciple of Vivekananda and a proponent of Indian nationalism. For the tragic case of such an Indian petitioner to Queen Victoria, see: Saloni Mathur, ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886’, Cultural Anthropology 15(4) 2000: 492–524. 128 Vivekananda, ‘Vartamana Bharata’ (1899), in Svami Vivekanander Vani o Rachana, vol. 6, Calcutta: Udbodhana Karyalaya, 1998, 190–91.

129 HCPP. East India (Indigo Commission). Return to an Address of the Honourable The House of Commons, 15 February 1861, 50, 68, 79–80, 150. 130 Testimony of Santosh Mundal, 4 June 1860, in ibid., 62. Sahib here refers to a European. 131 K. K. Sen Gupta, ‘The Agrarian League of Pabna, 1873’, in Peasant Resistance in India, 1858–1914, edited by David Hardiman, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, 117; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 July 1873, RNPB.

132 HCPP. East India (Deccan Riots Commission), 1878. Copy of the Report of the Commission Appointed in India to Inquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the Year 1875, in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency, 54; see also Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Deccan Riots of 1875’, The Journal of Asian Studies 24(4) 1965: 613–35; Neil Charlesworth, ‘The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875’, Modern Asian Studies 6(4) 1972: 401–21.

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133 Singh, Birsa, 88–89. 134 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 158, 1920, ‘Evidence Taken before the Disorders Inquiry Committee, vol. 4, Lahore and Kasur’, 142, 147, 355. The Rowlatt Act aimed at suppressing anticolonial protests in India. 135 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Forestry and Social Protest in British Kumaun, c. 1893–1921’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 4, edited by Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 92. 136 I borrow the phrase ‘princely impostor’ from Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. While Chatterjee deals with a Bengali zamindar lineage, I suggest that the colonial period witnessed a broad engagement with the idea of princely imposture, with the British monarchy as the most important locus of public debate. This section is also indebted to studies on British monarchic celebrations in India, mentioned in the Introduction of this book. 137 See for example: Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. 153P, Proceeding Nos. B 209–215, ‘Address Given by Private Individuals to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’, abstract in Proceedings of July 1876 (original file destroyed); Notification No. 1377 of the Home Department, Government of India, 23 June 1887, in Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. 166, Proceeding No. 7, December 1887, ‘Presentation of Addresses to the Members of the Royal Family’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 71/05 and 71(C)05(1), ‘Presentation of Addresses to their Royal Highnesses’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Progs. June 1911, Nos. 39–44, File A – 50 (1–6), ‘Addresses on the Occasions of the Coronation in London and Royal Visit to India’. 138 Letter from the Additional Deputy Secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign and Political Department to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 23 June 1920, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 187/1920, ‘Instructions Regarding Addresses to be Presented to H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught’. 139 Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Maharanir Dvitiya Putra Duke of Edinburgher Prati’, and ‘Bharata-Uchchhvasa’, in Navinachandrer Granthavali, vol. 1, Calcutta: Ashvinikumar Haldar, 1904, 127–34 and 351–60. Nabinchandra Sen (1847–1909) was a nationalist litterateur from Bengal. 140 RNPB March–December 1875 and January–March 1876. 141 RNPB 1875: Hindu Hitoishini, 11 December. 142 Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. 153T, Proceeding Nos. B 219–220, July 1876, ‘Detailed Programme of His Royal Highness’ Proceedings’. 143 Political Department, Government of Bengal, File 7B, Proceeding Nos. 72–95, March 1878, ‘Celebration in Bengal of the Assumption of the Imperial Title by Her Majesty the Queen’. 144 Letter from A. Mackenzie, Offg. Magistrate-Collector of Moorshedabad, to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division, 2 January 1877, in ibid., Proceeding Nos. 75–76.

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‘Caesar of India’ 105 145 RNPB May–June 1876.

146 RNPB 1878: Sahachar, 21 January.

147 RNPB 1876: Bharat Mihir, 15 June.

148 RNPB 1876: Soma Prakash, 6 November.

149 HCPP. East India (Native Press). Copy of Correspondence between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India on the Subject of Act IX of 1878, ‘An Act for the better Control of Publications in Oriental Languages’, 1878, 25, 54, 56. 150 Bipin Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1932, 275–78. Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932) was an Extremist Indian nationalist leader from Bengal. 151 Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. 14G, Proceeding Nos. 1–2, 4, 8, 1887. 152 RNPB January–February 1887.

153 Political Department, Government of Bengal, File J–12, Proceeding Nos. 19–23, October 1897, ‘Account of Celebration of the Diamond Jubilee in the Native States in Bengal’; Political Department, Government of Bengal, File J–13, Proceeding Nos. 29–41, ‘Account of Celebration of the Diamond Jubilee in Various Centres in Bengal’. 154 RNPB February–July 1897.

155 RNPB 1875: Rajshahye Samachar, 6 August.

156 Satishchandra Bandyopadhyay, ‘Dilli Darbar’, and Bijaychandra Majumdar, ‘Dillidarbar’, Pravasi 2(10-11), 1309 BS (1902–03): 356–67; Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making: Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years of Public Life, London: Oxford University Press, 1925, 174.

157 RNPB December 1902–February 1903.

158 RNPB: Sri Sri Vishnu Priya-o-Ananda Bazar Patrika, 18 February 1903. 159 RNPB July 1905–January 1906. 160 RNPB 1905: Sandhya, 7 July.

161 RNPB 1905: Daily Hitavadi, 18 July. 162 RNPB 1906: Hitavadi, 12 January.

163 RNPB 1906: Hindi Bangavasi, 8 January.

164 RNPB 1905: Bharat Mitra, 18 November. 165 RNPB 1906: Daily Hitavadi, 9 January.

166 Jon Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780– 1835, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 181.

167 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

168 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Rajabhakti’, 1906, and ‘Bahurajakata’, 1905, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1990, 223– 29. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was colonial India's most famous litterateur; he won the Nobel Prize in 1913.

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169 Lajpat Rai, The Man, 197. Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) was an Extremist nationalist leader from Punjab. 170 Mahatma Gandhi, CWMG, vol. 10, Delhi: Government of India, 1992, 204. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was the most celebrated Indian nationalist leader of the first half of the twentieth century. 171 Tilak, Writings and Speeches, 74–76, 80. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) was an Extremist nationalist leader. 172 Ibid., 106–28, 146–47. 173 RNPB 1911.

174 RNPB 1911: Pallivasi, 26 July.

175 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, File D–98, Proceeding Nos. B 270–93, March 1912. 176 RNPB December 1911 and January 1912.

177 RNPB 1911: Nayak, 14 December; Nayak, 16 December. 178 RNPB 1911: Dainik Chandrika, 12 December. 179 RNPB 1911: Basumati, 16 December.

180 RNPB 1911: Basumati, 23 December. 181 RNPB 1912: Bangavasi, 6 January. 182 RNPB 1912: Marwari, 2 January.

183 RNPB 1911: Indian Mirror, 24 December. 184 185 186 187

RNPB 1911: Nayak, 30 December. RNPB 1912: Nayak, 1 January. RNPB 1912: Nayak, 8 January. CWMG, vol. 18, Delhi: Government of India, 1990, 18–19, 30–32; CWMG, vol. 20, Delhi: Government of India, 1993, 328–29. Of colonial brutalities in Punjab, the most notorious was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 in which British firing led to innumerable civilian deaths. On the Caliphate, see Chapter 5. 188 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 253 (1–4), (5), (6), (7–10), 1921, ‘Precautionary Police Measures during the Forthcoming Tour in India of HRH the Prince of Wales’. 189 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 350 (1–19), 1921, ‘Appreciation of the General Effect of the Royal Visit to Bengal’ (quote from Memo, 31 December 1921, by E. H. Corbett, Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Bengal). ‘Mufassil’ refers to small town and rural areas outside a capital or big city. 190 RNPB June–December 1921. 191 RNPB 1921: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 September. 192 RNPB 1921: Indian Mirror, 18 November. 193 Letter from J. Donald, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign and Political Department, 13 April 1922, in

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‘Caesar of India’ 107 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 175 (1–2), 1922, ‘Report on the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in December 1921’. 194 Note of Lytton, April 1922, in ibid. 195 RNPB 1935: Commercial Gazette, 21 January; Kheyali, 24 January; Vagnadut, 15 February; Forward, 14 March; Advance, 3 April. 196 RNPB 1935: Mohammadi, 3 May; Mojahed, 19 April. 197 RNPB 1935: Naya Bangla, 5 April. 198 RNPB 1935: Nagarik, 8 May. 199 RNPB 1936: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 January; Forward, 22 January; The Star of India, 22 January; Advance, 26 January; Dainik Basumati, 26 January. 200 RNPB 1936: Advance, 5 November; Viswamitra, 5 November; 1937: Advance, 29 January, 10 February. 201 RNPB 1937: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 31 January. 202 RNPB 1937: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 24 April; also Ananda Bazar Patrika, 11 May; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11 May; Swatantra Bharat, 17 May. When the Advance was prosecuted for carrying a hostile piece on the coronation of George VI, it received sympathy from Dainik Basumati, 6 July; Ananda Bazar Patrika, 7 July; Azad, 8 July. 203 For example, Jogendranath Bandyopadhyay, Italyr Itivrtta-sambalita Mazzinir Jivanavrtta, Calcutta: Ramnrisimha Bandyopadhyay, 1879; Jogendranath Bandyopadhyay, Italyr Itivrtta-sambalita Garibaldir Jivanavrtta, Calcutta: Nanigopal Mukhopadhyay, 1890; RNPB: Bengalee, 7 January 1903, Bengalee, 26 August 1905, Daily Hitavadi, 3 November 1905, Indian Mirror, 17 November 1905, Bengalee, 20 December 1905; Rajanikanta Guha, ‘Svadeshi Andolana: Uhar Trividha Karya’, Pravasi 6(9) 1313 BS (1906–07): 491–93; Banerjea, Speeches and Writings, 391–416; Pal, B. C. Pal at Madras, 14–15, 135; HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 24; Banerjea, Nation, 43; Pal, Memories, 245–47; Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1962 (1936), 19; Jibantara Haldar, Anushilana Samitir Itihasa, Calcutta: Sutradhar, 2009 (1950), 72; C. A. Bayly, ‘Liberalism at Large: Mazzini and Nineteenth-Century Indian Thought’, in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920, edited by C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 355–74. 204 See for example the discussions during the Round Table Conferences of 1930–32.

205 Frank Bongiorno, ‘Commonwealthmen and Republicans: Dr H. V. Evatt, the Monarchy and India’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 46(1) 2000: 33–50; W. David McIntyre, ‘‘‘A Formula may have to be Found”: Ireland, India, and the Headship of the Commonwealth’, The Round Table 91(365) (2002): 391–413; Philip Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, The British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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2 ‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’

Imagining Sovereignty through the Princely States 2.1 Introduction In this chapter I argue that the princely states offered Indian reformers and nationalists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century new grammars of imagining national rulership, charismatic and paternalist governance, political theologies of monistic sovereignty and economy as well as idioms of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’. While existing scholarship on these states has focused on their social, economic and political history, and on their relations with the British imperial administration, there has been relatively little research done on the discursive impact of princely governments on Indian intellectuals and politicians who operated from (non-princely) British India. I address this gap by focusing on Cooch Behar and Tripura, the two princely states most closely associated with Bengal, and by relating these two detailed case studies with comparative findings from other parts of India. I suggest that ideas of sovereign rulership evolved through conversations with the princely states left a significant trace on intellectual debates in British India.

Located on the north-eastern margins of the subcontinent and with relatively small size and population, Cooch Behar and Tripura have received comparatively little historiographic attention. The ruling families here had a local martial-peasant provenance and did not originate from famed Rajput or Maratha backgrounds or prestigious Indo-Islamic lineages. Yet due to their proximity to British Bengal, these two states significantly influenced Indian reformist and nationalist thinking. I suggest that colonialism had a considerable ‘monarchising’ impact in these regions, and that many (though not all) influential Indians translated these monarchising programmes and hybridised them with elite South Asian notions of power to fashion their own patriotic projects of constructing ‘indigenous’ sovereignty. In the late precolonial centuries, vertical rulerships in these states had existed in tension with decentralised forms of martial-peasant community power and localised forms of social stratification. Colonial rule bolstered the centralising powers of rulers to

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 109

keep the external frontiers secure and to demilitarise subject populations in the attempt to convert them into docile rent and revenue paying masses. New ideas of kingship and dynastic legitimacy were manufactured in the process. Indian reformers and nationalists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century responded to monarchisation processes in diverse ways, often by valourising a strong state which would introduce good governance, and sometimes by differentiating between the impersonal and exploitative governance of British India and the supposedly superior personal and benevolent rule of some of the princely rulers. Some Indians argued that the benevolent princely state was like a benevolent patriarchal family. Such discourses were embedded in interventions which marginalised precolonial strands of shared and segmented authority in which royal kinsmen, princely women and armed peasants had enjoyed substantial role in policy-making and land-control.

Though many Indian nationalist programmes became more critical towards the princely states in the interwar years, nevertheless, the visions of national rulership constructed through the princely grammars proved to be of lasting importance. I argue this not only through an analysis of middle-class Indian discourses, but also by examining (in Chapter 4) the impact of these imaginaries on the subject peoples of the states. While it is not prudent to generalise on the basis of two case studies about the broader impact of princely states in South Asian nationalist thinking about rulership and sovereignty, I hope that this chapter can offer some basic conceptual points which would be useful in interrogating other princely states and other strands of nationalist imagination.

The argument that British rule had monarchised power in princely India was first advanced by many European administrators and intellectuals themselves. This discourse ran side by side with (and partially went against) the idea of oriental despotism. Thus, Voltaire suggested that Mughal India had a type of feudal government (‘un gouvernement féodale’) with a decentralised structure of authority and was not a despotic state; it was on a similar level of political organization as large parts of Europe. Voltaire criticised Montesquieu’s view about the supposed uniqueness of European feudalism.1 Later, James Tod2 argued that the British were endangering the Indian feudal balance of power between ruler and ruled by introducing alien monarchical principles. Tod had served as Political Agent to the Western Rajput States. His Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han was published in two volumes in 1829 and 1832. As he observed in 1832 before the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East

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India Company (which reviewed the state of things in India on the eve of the framing of the Charter Act of 1833): Already have the evil effects of our alliances received practical illustration, in a variety of ways, in almost every state of Rajpootana. The first effect is the abolition of all those wholesome checks which restrained the passions of their princes; for, applying our own monarchical principles, we recognise only the immediate power with whom we treated, and whom we engage to support against all enemies, internal and external. Being thus freed from the fear of a re-action amongst his feudatory kinsmen, the prince may pursue the dictates of a blind revenge, assured that no neighbour prince dare give sanctuary to his victims; or, if an insatiate avarice prompt him to visit the merchant and cultivator with contributions or exorbitant taxes on their labour, the sufferers have not even emigration left as a refuge. Marwar and Jessulmer have powerfully exemplified this, our alliance having completely neutralized all the checks that avarice or tyranny had to fear from the hatred of their chiefs or subjects. The ancient balance of power, which often ended in the deposal or death of a tyrant, we have thus completely destroyed. It would seem, indeed, that we do not rightly comprehend the scope of our own policy; for by a strange inconsistency, we turned a deaf year to the remonstrance of the chief vassals of Marwar when expelled from their estates and country by their prince; and the minister of Jessulmer was allowed to pursue the plunder of his subjects with impunity; but no sooner does the Raja of Bikaner apply to the paramount power to put down disaffection, than the aid denied to his kindred chiefs and subjects is promised to the prince. It never occurs to us that rebellion may be justifiable; it is enough that tumult exists, and that it must be repressed. The whole history of our power shows that we have hitherto acted in ignorance of the mutual relations of the princes and their people.3

James Mill’s diagnosis converged with that of Tod: In the ordinary state of things in India (though under such governments as that of India there was little of anything like a regular check), the princes stood in awe of their subjects. Insurrection against oppression was the general practice of the country. The princes knew that when mismanagement and oppression went to a certain extent, there would be revolt, and that they would stand a chance of being tumbled from their throne, and a successful leader of the insurgents put in their place. This check is, by our interference, totally taken away; for the people know that any attempt of theirs would

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 111

be utterly unavailing against our irresistible power, accordingly no such thought occurs to them, and they submit to every degree of oppression that befalls them.4

Despite these lasting transformations in the texture of power, at the level of colonial ideology and sociology, especially in the late-nineteenth-century British imagination, a neo-feudal articulation of authority, linking the British monarch to Indian princes and notables, formed an important component, as Bernard Cohn has most cogently argued.5 Ronald Inden has shown, however, that for some British minds, India had not even reached a feudal stage (and therefore a plane of comparability with Europe); rather, it was allegedly mired in tribal, clan and lineage stratification.6 The British did accommodate a certain level of pluralisation of sovereignty, as visible especially in the princely states. However, the overarching command was retained by the imperial state (symbolised by the monarch and the Viceroy). Official discourses promoted various theories of sovereignty, suzerainty and paramountcy to explain the relation between the imperial hegemon and the native states, but the exact nature of this relationship remained contested and open to debate till the end of the colonial era.7 This complexity had intellectual repercussions on metropolitan discussions about international law. Henry Maine famously expounded upon ‘divisible’ sovereignty, suggesting that John Austin’s notion of indivisible state sovereignty could not have validity for Indian princely states or for other ‘barbarous portions of the world’, as in ‘the protectorates which Germany, France, Italy, and Spain have established in the Australasian seas and on the coast of Africa’.8 Ultimately, no consistent theory could adequately explain the limited sovereignty of the Indian princely regimes, whose relation with the British depended on an ever shifting variety of treaty arrangements, colonial ideologies and imperial interventions (which did not come to an end in 1858, though there were to be no more formal annexations): ‘despite much debate, no consensus ever emerged as to the precise legal status of the Indian Rulers’.9 Historians differ about what this heterogeneity implied in practice. Drawing on his study of Pudukkottai in southern India, Nicholas Dirks has argued that colonial rule led to a decline of old-style kingships, grounded in martial retinues (generally drawn out of non-Brahmanical groups), and an ascendancy in the legal and bureaucratic authority of British-sponsored Brahmanical elites.10 But Aya Ikegame’s work on Mysore suggests that precolonial-origin forms

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of segmentary power and non-Brahmanical community networks sometimes remained resilient into the colonial era, and could be used by Indian rulers to enhance their authority.11 Manu Bhagavan, whose examples come from Mysore as well as Baroda, has shown how new indigenising expressions of nationalist modernity were framed in the princely states, with the ultimate objective of resisting the hegemonic implications of British colonial modernity.12 Siobhan Lambert-Hurley cites comparable reformist efforts, on an Indo-Islamic note, on the part of a succession of female rulers of Bhopal; these projects also specifically prioritised women’s agency and concerns.13 Hyderabad offered a laboratory for thinking about autonomous Indo-Islamic statehood. As Nile Green has shown, in a pioneering effort to situate princely states within globally-connected political and discursive spaces, Hyderabad’s visions drew inspiration from other contemporaneous models of Islamic and Asiatic state-building.14 Princely states offered experimental geographies for constructing monarchic modernities – to take a cue from Janaki Nair – driven, often ruthlessly, by elite interventions. For Nair, Mysore exemplified such a ‘“monarchical modern” form of power, that is, adapting the agenda of cultural renewal, modernization, and reform using the instrumentalities of state power refracted through the trappings of monarchy’, making possible a kind of (supposedly progressive) ‘governance in lieu of [democratic] politics’.15 In British and Indian reformist hands, princely women were often denigrated and shoved aside as obstacles to modernity, as analysed by Angma De Jhala; however the women often fought back, with varying degrees of success, in the battle for authority.16 Many Indian nationalists were attracted by the possibility of indigenous sovereignty that the princely states seemingly promised; they often desired alliances with the rulers so that they could implement their programmes of national uplift. The states could (potentially) offer lucrative jobs to independentminded nationalists, implement nationalist educational agendas, promote social reforms and welfare-oriented public works and serve as stark reminders that Indians could govern themselves without British interference.17 Colonial intrusions into princely affairs in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century therefore often aroused Indian nationalist wrath, as happened in Kolhapur, a princely state in western India, in the early 1880s. As Shruti Kapila has shown, British efforts to remove the ruler Shivaji IV from power on grounds of insanity provoked Bal Gangadhar Tilak to relate his anti-colonial activism

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to the cause of the ruler, who was a descendant of the Indian nationalist icon, the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji.18 Earlier, in 1875, when the British deposed Malhar Rao Gaekwad, the ruler of Baroda, because he allegedly tried to poison the British Resident, there was furore in the nationalist press across India. In Bengal, Amrita Lal Basu wrote a celebrated play portraying the Gaekwad as a martyr hero.19

There was a long history of friction between Baroda and the British. The state employed noted Indian nationalists in its administration, including Dadabhai Naoroji (appointed under Malhar Rao) as well as Romesh Chunder Dutt and Aurobindo Ghose (under Sayaji Rao). After retiring from the Indian Civil Service, Dutt became the Dewan of Baroda. To him, that state as well as Mysore were model polities that showed Indian capability of self-rule: ‘no part of India is better governed to-day than these States, ruled by their own Princes’.20 In the 1900s, nationalist activities in Baroda took a radical turn. The British were suspicious about Sayaji Rao, especially due to the latter’s connections with the expatriate Indian nationalists Krishnavarma and Madam Cama. During the 1911 Delhi Durbar, the ruler was accused by sections of British officialdom and press of showing disrespect to George V.21 Indian nationalists had a much more favourable impression about Sayaji Rao. When he visited Bengal in 1904, Bengali nationalists like Sarala Devi welcomed him with celebrations, arms display and martial games.22 Rabindranath Tagore described him in a welcome song as the best of rulers who gave sacred merit to the country by enabling its people to see a king (rajadarshana punya), removing India’s humiliation (as a colonised land).23 This was a politics of visualising (darshana) the country through seeing the native monarch. As visible in the martial celebrations, Bengali elites saw Baroda as a heroic inspiration which could guide Bengalis (and more broadly, Indians) in recovering an armed nationalist masculinity. It was on a comparable note that Sarojini Naidu praised Hyderabad (where she was born) for allowing Indians to bear arms, unlike British India where the Arms Act deprived the natives of this right. She earned applause when she declared at the Lucknow Congress of 1916: I come from a city where every man is privileged to carry arms – the African, the Rohilla, and the Sikh do carry arms there – and never has it been said in my city at Hyderabad that all these various armed elements have ever been disloyal to the sovereign power. Shall not the greater portion of India,

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British India, take a lesson from that one Indian state that knows how to trust the loyalty of its subjects?

Naidu saw Hyderabad in dichotomy with British India, where colonial governance produced ‘emasculated machines’ and not ‘men’.24

In his project for educational, social and religious reform of India in the 1890s and 1900s, Vivekananda got major allies and patrons from elites in Mysore, Alwar and Khetri (the last one a ‘little kingdom’ within the princely state of Jaipur) as well as from the quasi-kingly zamindari estate of Ramnad. Mysore and Ramnad were two principal Indian-controlled regimes in southern India, while Alwar and Khetri belonged to the prestigious Rajput princely heartland of northern India. Sections of the ruling classes here were attracted by Vivekananda’s ideal of Indian national regeneration and the guardian-like role it envisioned for the princely elites. In his correspondence with these rulers, Vivekananda idealised Kshatriya kingship. Vivekananda belonged to the Kayastha caste and claimed that Kayasthas were descendants of ancient Kshatriyas; this was part of a broader Kshatriyaising process among Kayasthas across India. He adopted the model of Church-State conflict from European history (perhaps especially from anti-Catholic Protestant British historiography) and conceptualised Indian history as a struggle between Brahmin priests and Kshatriya kings and ascetics, with the latter (including figures like Krishna and Buddha) championing freedom of thought against priestly tyranny and superstition. He advised the rulers of Khetri and Mysore to act like such Kshatriya heroes in spreading social-educational reform among Indians.25 Vivekananda was welcomed by the ruler and the elites of Mysore in 1892; the Ramakrishna movement founded by him helped spread nationalist education in the region.26 The rulers of Travancore and Cochin, two princely states in southern India, also played pioneer roles in educational reform. Across the early-mid twentieth century, some princely states gradually created representative political institutions as well, to enable educated Indians to take part in governance and formulation of state policy.27

2.2 Case Study I: Cooch Behar, Keshub Chunder Sen and discourses on monotheistic monarchisation Keshub Chunder Sen was arguably the most ‘monarchist’ of late-nineteenth century Bengali socio-religious reformers. Given his influence over middle Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.003

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class Indians between the 1860s and 1880s, interrogating his political vision helps us to realise the significance of monarchic-monotheistic imagination in contemporaneous India. Keshub’s discourse on modernity involved the translation of divine monotheistic sovereignty and sacred history into imperial monarchic sovereignty and human history. Keshub saw ‘God in history’ and ‘the finger of special Providence in the progress of nations’. He felt that: the record of British rule in India is not a chapter of profane history, but of ecclesiastical history. The book which treats of the moral, social, and religious advancement of our great country with the help of Western science, under the paternal rule of the British nation, is indeed a sacred book.

Providential time was translated into human time to create a notion of progress. ‘Providence […] rules India through England’; so educated Indians were ‘bound to be loyal to your Divinely-appointed sovereign.’ The British had come to their rescue ‘as God’s ambassador, when your country was sunk in ignorance and superstition’. Indians, by showing loyalty, could ‘advance with the aid of our rulers in the path of moral, social, and political reformation’, and ‘under an overruling Providence’, ‘serve most important purposes in the divine economy’. The imperial assemblage of 1877 appeared to Keshub as a mirror of a divine ceremony: We are rejoiced to see the Rajahs and Maharajahs of India offering their united homage to Empress Victoria and her representative at the Imperial assemblage. Far greater will be our rejoicing when all the chiefs and people of India shall be united with the English nation in a vast International Assemblage, before the throne of the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords.28

Keshub’s monarchic vision of sovereignty needs to be related to his actual connections with British and Indian royalty. In 1878, he gave his daughter Sunity in marriage to the ruler of Cooch Behar, Nripendra Narayan. Following his father’s death, the latter had become de-jure ruler in 1863, when only ten months old. The colonial state took charge of him and put him in the care of various tutors and educational institutions at Benares and Patna. British officials, operating through racialised assumptions about native influences, felt that the prince had to be removed from Cooch Behar so that he could get a good education.29 The case was hardly unique: the British often denigrated, and tried to minimise, Indian (especially female) influence on princes.30 In

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Cooch Behar, the British rejected a will which had transferred the minority administration to three Maharanis (queens). Instead, they appointed Colonel J. C. Haughton, Governor General’s Agent for the North-East Frontier, as Commissioner, entrusted with administering the state. A series of (British) Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners managed the state till 1883, with the aim of ensuring ‘the care and education of the young Maharaja, for the security of the tribute, and for the defence of the Bhutan frontier, for which the Government was responsible’.31

British frontier policy towards Bhutan was indeed a major factor that instigated colonial interventions in Cooch Behar. As several scholars have noted, in the late-precolonial and early-colonial period, there had been periodic conflicts between Cooch Behar and Bhutan. The Bhutanese at times managed to exercise considerable political dominion over Cooch Behar. In exchange for military assistance against the Bhutanese, the British managed early on to bring the ruler of Cooch Behar into a subordinate alliance with the East India Company. By a treaty of 1773, the ruler had to give half of his state’s annual revenue to the British; later, in 1780, this tribute was fixed into a permanent amount. The British desired a secure frontier with Bhutan, and to protect and foster trade between India and Tibet, as well as to get their tax dues from Cooch Behar. But the Bhutanese continued to raid Cooch Behar for capturing human beings as well as loot. The resultant tensions led to the Bhutan War of 1864–65. The British annexed large parts of the Bhutanese Dooars which had adjoined Cooch Behar as well as British Bengal and Assam. To permanently check Bhutanese incursions, they now desired to erect a strong rulership in Cooch Behar: hence the takeover of the state’s administration as well as the interventionist policy towards moulding the young ruler.32 The long-term result was to create a much more powerful monarchic state in Cooch Behar than had existed in previous centuries. Within decades, British interest in securing the border as well as promoting imperial trade networks with Tibet contributed towards creating a unified hereditary monarchy in Bhutan too. Ugyen Wangchuk became king there in 1907, replacing the older polycentric sharing of power between various monastic heads and non-monastic regional governors and elite families. The Indian princely state model partly inspired this structuring of kingship in Bhutan.33 For many British administrators, a ‘civilized state’ was, almost definitionally, one with a clearly structured hierarchy of authority. Deputy Commissioner H.

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Beveridge, appointed in 1864 to assist the Commissioner during the AngloBhutan War, argued that old regime Cooch Behar had lacked: the organisation of a civilised State. [...] There was no cohesion or real subordination in any part of the administration from top to bottom. Every officer did what was right in his eyes, and acknowledged no authority but that of the Raja, and his subordination even to him was in most cases only lip-service.34

Apart from frontier policy, the British also desired a centralised and hierarchical state to enable revenue maximisation. As Harendra Narayan Chaudhuri, an official in charge of the land revenue settlement, later noted in a report published in 1903, in pre-‘reform’ Cooch Behar, ‘resources of the government were not large. The only source of revenue worth mention was land, and even this was not properly taxed’; ‘settlement of revenue was made on easy terms’ with ijaradars (revenue farmers). ‘Large quantities of land had been alienated often with questionable authority as Brahmattar and rent-free lands, and thus the way to future enhancement of revenue had been practically closed.’35 The British wished to change things.

I build my argument here about Cooch Behar’s shifting political economy on the basis of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century government reports as well as the incisive analyses of later historians. These observers and scholars are practically unanimous in noting that the British, from 1790, had intensified fiscal rigour in Cooch Behar by introducing the ijaradari system, which remained in place till 1872. In the late-nineteenth century, there emerged, under British administration, more sophisticated practices of fiscal assessment (the first revenue settlement began in 1864) and control, including the accentuation of revenue demands on, and often total resumption of, rent-free and privileged land grants under debottar, brahmattar, pirpal, lakhiraj, petbhata and jaigir categories. Many local actors lost their traditional employment. Among the principal ‘victims’ were broad categories of royal kinsmen, and especially (given the gendered nature of colonial interventions) women, old regime state officials, precolonial-origin religious and literary classes, native soldiers and various service-providers who catered to the extended princely lineage and to state shrines. Thus, ‘indigenous’ non-Brahmanical communities, often of martial peasant provenance, suffered, and so did local literati. In this new system, some categories of landholders, from jotedars to undertenants,

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were given formal occupancy rights. But to cope with the intense revenue pressure, substantial landholders often transferred labour and fiscal burdens to undertenants and sharecroppers. The gain of formal rights by sections of rural society thus needs to be juxtaposed with this landscape of economic extraction and exploitation. Undoubtedly, the Cooch Behar state apparatus and behind it the British government, gained from the economic engineering. But there were also concrete and handsome profits which were made by specific British officials and Indian ones (including by immigrant, upper-caste Bengalis who began to dominate the state machinery, using their skills in Western education and British-style administration to displace local elites).36 The first Commissioner, Haughton, to consider one example, received a salary which ‘exceeded those of all the heads of offices in Cooch Behar put together’.37 Calica Doss Dutt, who became Dewan of the state in 1869, summarised that following reforms begun in the late 1860s, ‘the revenue rose from Rs 3,64,139 to Rs 9,38,610, owing to the assessment of large quantities of invalid rent-free holdings and of khas lands included in jotes without lawful authority’.38 A relatively segmented, or even pluri-centric, mode of fiscal statehood was gradually replaced in Cooch Behar with a centralised apparatus of power, unified under a monarchic regime. The British wanted this restructuring, achieved between the 1860s and early 1880s, to endure even when Nripendra Narayan assumed the reins of governance; hence their attention to his education and to ‘private’ influences on him. Colonial officials thus engineered his marriage with Sunity Devi in 1878, even though it ended up creating a schism in the section of the monotheistic Brahmo religious reform movement (the Brahmo Samaj of India) which was led by Keshub. The rebels broke away to form the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. They claimed to offer a more democratic form of organization, in contradistinction to Keshub’s autocratic leadership. They accused Keshub of betraying reformist ideals by holding his daughter’s marriage when she was not yet fourteen, the minimum age of marriage for women according to a special civil marriage act of 1872 which had been passed to benefit reformist Indians, and especially Brahmos.39 The issue of ritual, as Rochona Majumdar has recently noted, was also crucial. It was widely discussed as to what extent Keshub had compromised in accepting Hindu marital rituals. In Brahmo eyes, such rituals were tainted with polytheism: abjuring them was critical to breaking away from Hindu orthodoxy and becoming a Brahmo.40 Given the controversy among Bengalis about the ideological implications and legal validity of the marriage (or betrothal,

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as some regarded it), the colonial state had to intervene. The British guaranteed the union’s legality to prevent problems regarding princely succession.41

What interests me, and what has not been explored earlier in adequate conceptual depth, is the way in which monarchisation of governance in Cooch Behar was integrally related to debates about monarchism, monotheism and constitutionalism in British India. At least that is the impression we get from Sivanath Sastri, the Brahmo reformer who felt that Keshub relied too much, for his theology and for his social organization, on vertical structures of leadership and command: on what Keshub himself referred to as adesh or divinely-inspired injunctions. If Keshub’s model of divine and human governance was ‘monarchic’ in morphology (and as we shall later see, this was tied to the governmental transformations in Cooch Behar), for his detractors, divinity as well as human politics, and in concrete terms the Brahmo organization, had to be based on constitutional democracy. In Sastri’s words, the latter thus ‘began to agitate for the introduction of methods of constitutional government in the management of the affairs of the Church in general’.42 A letter written by an opponent of Keshub defined this constitutionalism in terms of having: a representative Council in which all the provincial Samajes should be represented, and nothing ought to be done without consulting their voice. No rules or bye-laws ought to be passed to which all Brahmos, members of the Samaj, do not agree. No doctrine ought to be promulgated as a doctrine of the Samaj which is not consented to by a majority of Brahmos.43

The Catholic Church had proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility during the First Vatican Council of 1869–70, whereby the Pope was supposed to be infallible when he exercised his supreme apostolic authority in defining doctrine regarding faith or morals. The rebel Brahmos alleged that Keshub was claiming a similar ‘infallibility’, introducing the ‘evils’ of ‘Popery and priest-craft’ into his ‘Church’.44 Brahmos might believe in a unitary divinity, but most did not repose faith in a unitary ‘monarchic’ representative of this divinity; hence the constitutionalisation of theology. Was the controversy of the 1870s not just about the constitutionalisation of religion, but also about the constitutionalisation of the Indian state? Was the debate on the structure of Brahmo theology ultimately a debate about the structure of Indian sovereignty? Brahmo-nationalist politician Bipin Chandra Pal thought so, and so perhaps did some of his contemporaries like Ananda

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Mohan Bose (who would become the President of the Indian National Congress in 1898). Pal argued that the young men led by Sivanath Sastri were inspired by ideals: [...] of freedom, personal, social, as well as political. [...] Ananda Mohan, though not openly identified with us, had yet seen this larger vision of national freedom and sovereignty, and in drafting a constitution for the Sadharana Brahmo Samaj he was moved by this larger vision and wanted to give to this new Brahmo Samaj a constitution that would some day furnish a model for the constitution of the future National State of India. [...] The makers of this constitution for the Sadharana Brahmo Samaj carefully devised checks and counter-checks to prevent the growth of any manner of autocracy in this Samaj. The central idea of the makers of this constitution was to prevent the development of any manner of leadership of any individual, howsoever endowed he might be, in the control and direction of its affairs.45

In contrast to this constitutionalism, Keshub’s discourse on ‘divine economy’, quoted a little while ago, hints at the way he conceived of government as a rule (nomos) of the household (oikos). God was the ultimate ruler in this household and Victoria was the mother who presided over the British Empire. Under Victoria, the officials, rajas and maharajas paternally administered the Indian people. The family too was an economy, the Lord’s household whose relationship-structure needed to be regulated according to divine commands, just as the Brahmo Samaj was an economy, guided by its leader, Keshub.46 To enunciate his model of the household, Keshub deployed upper-caste Sanskritic images of the goddess Lakshmi47 and Christianised ideas of the home as a chapel, with divinity being present ‘in all the arrangements of our domestic economy’.48 He insisted on hygiene, manners, well-balanced finances and domestic peace: from his perspective, women had a special role in ensuring the working of this household, and therefore had to be not only given (regulated) freedoms, but also to be trained to be good daughters and wives.49 Keshub transposed this model of household governance to the colonial state as well. He wrote in 1881: ‘The earthly sovereign is God’s representative, and must therefore have our allegiance and homage. We look upon Victoria as our Queen-Mother, and we are politically her children.’ The implication was a monarchically-inflected loyalism, since Victoria: [...] represents law, order and justice and is appointed by Providence to rule over us as a mother is appointed to look after her children. Therefore,

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we love her and honour her, and consider loyalty to be as sacred as filial obedience. [...] A man who hates his sovereign is morally as culpable as he who abhors and maltreats his father or mother. Sedition is rebellion against the authority of God’s representative, and therefore against God. It is not merely a political offence, but a sin against Providence. Disloyalty and infidelity are convertible terms, so thoroughly is the British Government in India identified with the saving economy of Providence.50

Keshub acknowledged his movement to be a product of British rule; his followers were hence to ‘eschew disloyalty as a moral evil, involving treasonable ingratitude and a denial of God in History’.51 This absolutist theologisation of the state demonstrated the arrival of a robust political-theological concept of modern statehood in Indian reformist discourse. In the name of revering the ‘sovereign’, its goal was to make all subjects loyal to the state and to thereby make them affirm the hegemonic authority of the state’s sovereignty.

Using the idiom of economy in another 1881 essay, Keshub saw the Brahmo movement as showing transformations ‘in the economy of Providence’. He mapped Brahmo religious politics onto the household structure of the Trinity. The revolt of Rammohun Roy against Hindu ‘idolatry’ was a war for the Father. The rebellion of the Brahmos led by Keshub against the Brahmo movement headed by Debendranath Tagore was an attempt to move beyond ‘mere monotheistic worship’ and celebrate the Son, by attuning the mind to ‘Divine will’. The separation of the Keshub-led Brahmos from the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj was a move to honour the ‘Holy Ghost’ or ‘Holy Spirit’, since Keshub and his followers upheld the ‘doctrine of Inspiration or Adesh’.52 The use of the Holy Spirit to support Keshub’s command provided a pioneer theorisation of charismatic leadership in colonial Bengal. It can be compared to the later efforts of Max Weber whose notion of charismatic authority was embedded in Biblical ideas of divine inspiration (especially as given by the Holy Spirit).53 The schism between Keshub and his opponents was therefore, in a sense, one between a charismatic-inspirational model of authority, which also drew on monarchic governmental imaginaries, and a legal-constitutional one. Keshub’s engagement with Catholic doctrine in evolving a commandoriented form of authority is interesting, since for the opposition it implied a kind of local Indian manifestation of a global neo-Catholic and papalist revival. The charge is plausible. In an 1881 essay, titled ‘Address to the Spirit of Saint Peter’, Keshub invoked the apostle as ‘the gate-keeper of heaven’ who held

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‘the key of Paradise’, and declared: ‘Then there is no admission into heaven without thy permission’; ‘In thee is the unity of Church perfected’. Along with this celebration of the Petrine foundation of the Church, Keshub eulogised the vision of a ‘Catholic Church of God’. He asserted that this Catholic Church was not a narrowly ‘Roman Catholic Church’, but a ‘Human Catholic Church’, a ‘Universal Church of humanity’. Hence devout human beings, even if they were not Roman Catholics, would be a part of this Catholic Church and admitted into heaven by St Peter.54 Around this time, Keshub’s organization was engaged in polemical battles with the Roman Catholic Church.55 Keshub perhaps wanted to appropriate the notion of Petrine authority (and the opposition would say, of papal infallibility) whilst simultaneously rejecting the exclusionary claims of the Roman Catholic Church. The term ‘Apostolic Durbar’56 was increasingly used by Keshub and his followers, especially to refer to their missionary organization. The phrase mixed the durbar ceremonial imagery of British colonial and Indian princely monarchies with the idea of the Church’s apostolic legitimacy and mission. Keshub thus sought to de-provincialise and de-racialise the Church, and to appropriate its authority for the cause of Indian reformism. For him, this had an ethical rationale, given that in ‘the economy of Providence we are all included in the scheme of Christ’s atoning redemption’. Jesus ‘includes us all in spite of our errors and transgressions, and Hindus though we are, in his vast scheme of reconciliation, even the most orthodox Christian cannot deny ’.57 Keshub’s theological turn as well his praise of personal monarchic rule were, in a sense, two facets of the same worldview. He sought, at least initially, to criticise colonial economic exploitation and neglect of Indians by persuading the British to act as good human beings and good Christians who could serve as righteous trustees of divine government. This position was visible, for example, in a speech given in Britain in 1870 (in a meeting chaired by former Viceroy, Lord Lawrence, and attended by three Members of the Parliament, among others), where Keshub condemned the harmful impact of the British cotton-textile industry on India as well as the physical brutalities committed by British residents towards Indians. He urged the British to instead act as ‘trustees’ who were ‘accountable to God’, and ‘to hold India’ only ‘for the good and welfare of India’.58 This sort of stance was calculated to win the sympathies of liberal British minds. On the downside, it led Keshub, particularly during the 1870s, to increasingly replace systematic critiques of colonialism and structural articulations of liberal reform with appeals to individual conscience

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and theology: a transformation which has also been noticed by the historian David Kopf. The origin of this shift dated earlier, to the 1860s, and was related to Keshub’s argument about the function of ‘great men’ in world history.59 In a controversial lecture given in the Town Hall of Calcutta in 1866, he suggested that ‘Great men’ appeared to rescue ‘nations’ in times of need. Operating through the conceptual disjuncture of general providence and special providence, a binary ultimately derived from Christian theology, Keshub mapped the role of reformers into the domain of special providence in ‘God’s moral government’. ‘In the established economy of Providence they are special dispensations to meet the pressing wants of humanity;’60 God’s ‘special providence’ was demonstrated by ‘those special dispensations which He from time to time makes through His prophets to save whole nations from error and iniquity’.61 This was distinct from the realm of God’s general providence and ordinary or known laws; God as special providence manifested himself through great men who demonstrated ‘a higher and latent law’.62 In presenting this thesis, Keshub was indebted to Thomas Carlyle’s idea that the ‘history of the world [...] is the biography of great men’, though he gave his own political-theological twist to that.63 For him, ‘great men’ were ‘God in history’, the ‘incarnation’ of God, ‘the spirit of God manifest in human flesh’.64 From this position of believing in direct divine intervention in human history and life, Keshub also emphasised the significance of ‘inspiration; it is the direct action of the Holy Spirit’.65

The 1866 lecture thus contained, in a nuclear form, some of the most controversial of Keshub’s later assumptions. In 1870, he repeated that the Brahmo Samaj, ‘or the Reformed National Church of India’ demonstrated ‘God’s Providence, not merely general but special Providence, acting in a special manner for the salvation of that great country’.66 The political significance of this providentialism became fully clear in 1878, when Keshub invoked ‘a strange overpowering dispensation of the living providence of God’ during the Cooch Behar marriage.67 His disciples were eventually expected to systematically believe in both general and special providence, and profess as such during their initiation rite.68 Providence, and especially the idea of special providence and special dispensation, thus played an absolutely cardinal role in Keshub’s political theology, to the extent that his movement came to be called the creed of the New Dispensation. Between the 1870s and early 1880s, faith in benevolent kingship added one more layer to Keshub’s belief structure, besides his faith in monotheistic divine providentialism and in the redemptive role of great men in

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history. These three strands were in fact closely entangled and stemmed from Keshub’s idealisation of ‘personal’ governance, whether by God, by the British, by Indian princes, or by Indian reformers. One gets a sense of this outlook from an essay he wrote in the early 1880s: The East is the land of symbols, of imposing ceremonies, dazzling colours and personal attachment. Here concrete realities flourish and abstractions have no charm. [...] Mere ideas can hardly acquire a mastery over the oriental mind unless they present themselves in concrete forms. [...] It will not fasten its love in abstract principles or logical proposition. It must have a person to love and honour. This applies both to theology and politics. Abstract notions of constitutionalism, loyalty to law, balance of power and such things, which find favour in the west have no influence here. Eastern nations cannot realize invisible and metaphysical governments. They would see their sovereign before they can give him their love and loyalty. Republicanism, socialism and other political isms of the west have no meaning whatever to our countrymen, who recognise only one form of government, namely personal monarchy. The Hindu’s idea of the State is the household vastly enlarged. His sovereign is the father of the people, and the subjects are as children. This idea of a fathersovereign seems to be inherent in the Native mind, and no amount of occidental civilization can efface it. If we love and revere our Queen-Empress, we can love and revere her only as our mother. No other politics is possible in the east. Before an empty throne of abstract justice, before such a thing as crowned constitutionalism our people will not bow. Justice and law must be incarnated in the flesh before the nation can be persuaded to offer the tribute of its loyalty. Of course we speak of the masses, among whom we see the true type of Indian nationality, and not of the exceptional few whom philosophy has exalted above their species or whom English civilization has given a doubtful varnish. Among the handful of our educated countrymen we may see spirited democrats, thorough-going republicans, uncompromising levellers, fiery radicals and even sworn nihilists, but the cries of these young champions of frothy patriotism touch not, change not the heart of the nation which is in core attached to royalism.69

As can be seen from the passage above, Keshub’s discourse did not (contrary to his own statement) represent an unchanging Indian tradition of kingship. Rather, it rose in reaction to modern forms of constitutionalism, council politics, bureaucratic administration, as well as republican and socialist ideals, to which Keshub counterpoised his ideal of personal monarchic rule. I have earlier also suggested that Keshub sought to overcome the structures of colonial economic

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exploitation through individuated appeals to the imperial conscience. The endresult was a critique of ‘abstraction’, and a related new theory of sovereignty. Like many British colonial administrators and intellectuals (see chapter 1), he stressed on the rule of a sovereign, rather than the operation of an abstract and impersonal state sovereignty. This was a discourse on sovereignty that represented and concealed itself as a discourse on the sovereign: a celebration of state authority through the celebration of a monarch. Keshub’s discourse of ‘seeing the sovereign’ articulated the hope of visualising, aestheticising, and embodying sovereignty in a person. It created a modern governmental valence for the theology of incarnation as well. In the passage above, Keshub suggested that justice and law must be ‘incarnated in the flesh’. We should read this in tandem with his historicisation of the idea of the Trinity, as well as his belief that great men, and especially reformers, functioned as divine incarnations while transforming history. In Keshub’s case, this political theology was rooted in empire, though it also showed some appreciation for the concerns of the Indian nation. Other Indians, as I shall show in Chapter 3, would apply this logic of incarnation, of seeing the sovereign in an idealised monarch, and of thereby establishing a hegemonic bond between state and people, to the constitution of the nation-state.

Keshub’s monarchism also needs to be mapped in terms of his connections with British and Indian royalty. During his Britain tour of 1870, he had a private interview with Queen Victoria and her daughter, Princess Louise. Keshub discussed with Victoria about social reforms in India and the education of Indian women. He gave her two portraits of his wife and was later asked by the Queen to send her some photographs of his as well.70 The impact of this meeting was quite momentous in terms of moulding Keshub’s ideology. At a farewell soiree given to him in London by Unitarians, he proclaimed that he ‘was always a faithful and loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, but since my interview with her, my attachment to her has been deeper than ever’.71 Equally significant, in intensifying Keshub’s royalism, was of course the 1878 marriage. Across the 1860s and 1870s, expatriate and itinerant Bengalis had spread Brahmo ideals of social reform across South Asia, influencing local reformers especially in Bombay and Madras Presidencies; Keshub had played a leading role in this missionary endeavour.72 There is little reason to doubt that a genuine reformist zeal motivated Keshub to arrange Sunity’s marriage to Nripendra Narayan. Later, another of his daughters, Sucharu, was given

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in marriage to the ruler of Mayurbhanj, a princely state on the Bengal-Orissa borderland.73

Bolstered by his links with British and Indian royalty, Keshub regarded monarchs and monarchism as fulcrums of his reform programme. He found the princely states inspirational for the manner in which the subjects there showed ‘an enthusiastic outburst of genuine sentiment and personal attachment [...] for the sovereign’.74 For Keshub, who had been so successful in establishing familial contacts with royalty, the celestial, imperial, princely, national and familial households were ultimately linked together in seamless unity. Hence, the title of this chapter invokes Keshub’s concept of the state as a household vastly enlarged. The idea of God mirrored the idea of the imperial sovereign: monotheism in religion and monarchy in government supported each other, and imperial sovereignty bolstered heavenly sovereignty. In Keshub’s words, ‘in recognising our earthly sovereign we recognise the providence of our Heavenly Sovereign. In honouring her we magnify Him who hath appointed and set her to rule over us’.75 The monotheistic vision of a parental and singular divinity towering above all other powers reinforced the imperial vision of a British monarchy which transcended other ruling chiefs and peoples. Both mirrored the image of Keshub as a ‘great man’ who loomed over lesser personages. Such a starkly vertical worldview was contested by many of Keshub’s erstwhile disciples and those republican Indian nationalists who operated (if we invert Keshub’s theology) through the polis rather than through the oikos, through the general will of the people and general-providential constitutionalism, rather than through the ‘economic’ and ‘special-providential’ apparatus of empire, native prince and ‘great men’, through constitution rather than dispensation.76 Keshub’s theology found a poignant expression in a prayer offered by the congregation at the Calcutta headquarters of Keshub’s organization on 8 November 1883, as Nripendra Narayan was being installed in Cooch Behar and assuming direct rule over the state. The prayer underlines the soteriology behind the reformer-royalty alliance, which was visualised as a sign of God’s ‘inscrutable dispensation’. Sunity was cast as almost a second Mary, ‘surrendered’ by Keshub to God and in marriage to ‘Kaiser’s feudatory’ so that ‘I [God] may raise an unhappy and degraded race and give it the blessings of civilization and enlightenment. I will have it married to a brighter and more advanced province in my Indian dominion. The blood of new Israel I will put into an old race, and give it new life; and out of inter-tribal alliance I will bring light

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and life to suffering millions.’ Under God’s ‘providence’, the princely couple had ‘spread an influence for good in their benighted territory’. The ‘Sovereign of sovereigns’ was now ‘placing over their heads the crown of royalty’, while the subjects ‘recognise and welcome their own beloved Raja and Rani, their father and mother’. The congregation saw ‘the triumph’ of God’s ‘providential economy’ here, with the couple ‘appointed’ by God ‘to do a great work towards the country's reformation’, thus fulfilling God’s ‘dispensation’. The thanksgiving ended with the messianic doxology: ‘Thine, O God, are all the principalities and kingdoms of the world, and Thine is all glory and all power. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Amen.’77

Interestingly, around that very time, a comparable ideal of progress was being sketched by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal Sir Augustus Rivers Thompson. At the Installation Durbar in Cooch Behar, he stressed on the colonially-initiated reform of revenue, civil and criminal justice, and police systems in Cooch Behar, on the state’s integration with British India through roads, railways, postal and telegraphic communication, on the building of modern-Western schools, and on the reorganization of the land revenue system and of the structure of peasant rights. To Rivers Thompson, these represented ‘the beginning of civilization’ in Cooch Behar, and ‘the kindly sentiment and good feeling which Englishmen entertain for the advancement of the people of India in the path of all real and true progress’. Nripendra Narayan was urged to continue such reforms, and make ‘the independent management of your native State by native agency, a model of administration’, ‘as the representative of more than half a million of subjects whom God has committed to your trust’.78 British colonial and Brahmo ideologies of progress and monarchic trusteeship clearly mirrored each other.

Keshub’s theology of progress should also be contextualised in relation to the changing political economy of Cooch Behar. The rulers of Cooch Behar had traditionally given land grants to sustain a polyarchy of deities and shrines: across the state of Cooch Behar, as well as in pilgrimage towns in British India, such as Benares, Brindavan and Kamakhya.79 The strict fiscal control which began to be exercised in the colonial era on the administration of these traditional grants represented the material face of the ideological challenge mounted by Brahmoimperial monotheism against ‘polytheism’ in South Asian piety. Furthermore, Keshub’s imaginary of a monarchic – and monotheistic – patriarchal household assumes material depth when studied in relation to the conversion of a partly

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polycentric governmental apparatus – where princely women, kinsmen, and autonomous martial peasant elites, soldiers and service-providers had played a crucial role – to a modern state where a male ruler administered his subordinates through a defined administrative-bureaucratic chain of command.

These transformations in rulership within Cooch Behar received British royal sanction. Nripendra Narayan had met the Queen and the Prince of Wales during his first trip to Britain in 1878. Later, during the Jubilee celebrations of 1887–88 in Britain, the Queen invested Nripendra Narayan with the Insignia of the Knight Grand Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire. She expressed her ‘respect and friendship’ towards him in a letter she wrote to Sunity Devi. Nripendra Narayan also became an Honorary Aide-deCamp to the Prince of Wales. In 1898, he became a Companion of the Bath, and later, Aide-de-Camp to King-Emperor Edward VII. Sunity received the Imperial Order of the Crown of India in 1887. The transregional networks of the couple in European circuits were sustained by their descendants, one of whom was the politician Gayatri Devi who married the ruler of Jaipur.80 She would play a covert but significant role in the politics of Cooch Behar in postcolonial years.81 In spite of breaks created by colonialism, women in the Cooch Behar lineage in fact continued to exert their agency (from the precolonial to the colonial and postcolonial periods), combining cultural interventions and political manoeuvring.82 If the princely state was conceptualised in the colonial era as a patriarchal household, women often used the very sinews of this householdstate to enhance their authority in the political arena.

Keshub’s matrimonial policy left an enduring legacy in Cooch Behar. Nripendra Narayan became a member of Keshub’s New Dispensation Church of the Brahmo Samaj, ‘regulated’ ‘domestic ceremonies in his family’ according to that creed and established a New Dispensation Church in the Cooch Behar town.83 His funerary monument carries the banner of the creed. (Admittedly, Brahmoism never became an exclusive state religion: the state continued to patronise Hindu and Muslim shrines and festivals.84) During Nripendra Narayan’s long reign (he died in 1911), as David Kopf notes, the Brahmo ruler transformed the state by building several roads, bridges and railway links, modernised the capital into a planned city, and established significant landmarks of judicial, medical and educational infrastructure,85 visibly fulfilling Keshub’s monotheistic-monarchic agenda of progress. These reforms have given Nripendra Narayan’s reign the flavour of a golden

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age in local memory. However, one should distinguish between this image of righteous kingship and the complexities of historical reality.86 Monarchic reforms involved transfer of governmental power to upper-caste Bengali elites, and revenue maximisation. In fact, land revenue increased from Rs 7,87,967 in 1864 to Rs 19,65,550 in 1883–84, and finally to Rs 22,72,608 in 1899–1900:87 a 188 per cent increase in thirty-five years. The princely administration justified this by arguing that the state created educational and medical institutions, markets, roads and railways.88 But the nature of development was asymmetrical. For example, when the Victoria College was built in Cooch Behar in 1888 to commemorate the Queen’s Jubilee, to keep the allotment of funds to the educational sector constant, the expenses for primary and secondary education were ‘heavily curtailed’. The Normal School was done away with, several village schools and pathshalas ‘reduced or abolished’, and scholarships and stipends ‘made much smaller’.89 Such policy asymmetries effectively prioritised Bengali elites, the chief beneficiaries of higher education, over the bulk of the state’s commoner subjects, including the vast peasantry, who would have benefited most from primary education. There were also major qualitative shifts in cultural and educational patronage. As various scholars have noted, in precolonial Cooch Behar, royal patronage had sustained sophisticated forms of literary and cultural production in which local actors had a significant hand.90 The asymmetrical advent of Western education, accompanied by the reduction (though, not total abolition) of traditional networks of patronage, arguably contributed to the solidification of new socio-cultural hierarchies, and especially to strengthening the dominance of immigrant Western-educated elite Bengalis over the state’s indigenous populace. Historians like Prajnaparamita Sarkar have argued that the princely regime’s educational and cultural policies widened the gulf between the ruling class and the masses.91 This gulf even hindered the spread of modern-Western reforms. For example, with some important exceptions, late-nineteenth century attempts in Cooch Behar to spread Western medicine and techniques of agriculture and animal husbandry often met with failures in the rural interior. State officials typically accused villagers of being ‘conservatives’ who failed to adopt new systems. Dissident voices however blamed the inability of state agents to adapt modern techniques to local needs.92 It is likely that the growing cultural and educational divides outlined above had a role in preventing the princely state’s officials and experts from effectively communicating with the rural subjects on matters of vital public concern.

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Comparable patterns of hierarchy can be observed in the domain of agrarian development. Where land revenue was increased through clearance of waste lands and uncultivated areas (such as jungles, marshes and swamps), labour was often provided by communities like the Meches and Garos who were classified as ‘wild tribes’. But they were expelled once the land was cleared; land settlement was subsequently done in favour of ‘civilised tenants’.93 Public works activities were also asymmetrical in scope. Much of the newly acquired state funds, obtained through revenue maximisation, were channelled towards the capital city and the network of princely institutions and elites there. In fact, of the total of 82,00,000 rupees spent on public works from the start of Nripendra Narayan’s reign to the beginning of the twentieth century, 22,00,000 rupees were spent on the new palace and connected buildings alone.94 Princely policies of investing in transport, communication and other economic infrastructure thus drew Cooch Behar ever more intensively into the imperial economic networks of British India, even as they also ended up discriminating against peasant and ‘tribal’ communities. The few peasant-origin politicians who benefited from opportunities of higher learning in Cooch Behar, agitated for transformations in princely policies of welfare.95 They wanted many more of their community members, and not just immigrant Bengali elites, to benefit from modern education, sanitation and health facilities and economic institutions. While vernacularising and subalternising agendas of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, they also radically remapped ideals of monotheistic and monarchic rulership.

2.3 Case study II: The colonial state, Rabindranath Tagore and the monarchisation and dynasticisation of governance in Tripura In this section, I shall argue that the British helped in monarchising the texture of governance in Tripura through their interventions across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the creation of a dynastic norm of succession was one aspect to this. I shall also analyse how many Bengali nationalists discussed and debated about this emergent monarchic order in Tripura in order to construct their ideals of patriotic rulership and national sovereignty. In precolonial Tripura, dynastic succession often did occur through patrilineal descent. However, there were also many cases in which wider communities of subjects selected a new ruler. Tripura’s local chronicle tradition, as encapsulated in the state-sponsored Rajamala, thus narrated episodes in the

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kingdom’s precolonial history when rulers who unlawfully robbed people of their lives and wealth, molested women, or claimed divine status were deposed through the efforts of the people (loka, praja) and/or officers (senapati, sainya, mantri, patra, mitra). The latter then instituted new rulers.96 Reflecting on these events, Kaliprasanna Sen, the Bengali scholar appointed in the earlytwentieth century to bring out a new edition of the Rajamala, commented that ‘the people (prakrti punja) had extraordinary power about selecting (nirvachana) the raja, and in the face of that inexorable power, the lineage custom (kaulik pratha) was often weakened’.97 Patrilineal succession was also complicated by the rise to the throne of ambitious ‘new men’. The Rajamala contained strong hints of fabrication of patrilineal continuity, mentioning posthumously born as well as miraculously ‘discovered’ sons whose royal identity had remained concealed before. These incidents resemble widely prevalent Indian mythic and literary tropes which gave a venerable royal or divine ancestry to parvenu rulers.98 The epic Mahabharata and the foundation legend of the Koch dynasty (see Chapter 4) demonstrate such narratives. In fact, what Norbert Peabody observes about Rajput states, may equally be applied to non-Rajput polities like Tripura: fabricated genealogies created connections between the political reality of social mobility (and the achievement of royal authority by individuals of humble origin) and the felt desire for hereditary legitimacy.99

And finally, internecine feuds between royal kinsmen further weakened norms of hereditary succession in Tripura. Such conflicts regularly erupted even in the nineteenth century, with particular intensity between the 1800s and 1820s and between the 1860s and 1870s. In the absence of any universally recognised law of monarchic succession in the state, British colonial courts often intervened to adjudicate. The British wanted to keep the state secure from frontier ‘tribes’, and particularly from the ‘Kukis, who are always called in as auxiliaries by one or other of the contending parties’.100 The Kukis too had their rationale to intervene in these disputes, since they gave them an opportunity to enhance their power and challenge the colonially-aided dominance of Tripura’s rulers. Indeed, Alexander Mackenzie suggested that the rulers of Tripura had taken advantage ‘of the mild character of our [British] Government’ to increase their authority, but this had resulted in a spiral outbreak of violence. Realising ‘the fact that in some part, at any rate, of their ancestral territory they were to be completely free from control’, Tripura’s rulers set about ‘to enlarge the borders of their independent kingdom’, carrying out ‘a desultory warfare with the various

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Kookie tribes living on the east of their State and reduced many villages to subjection’. Ensuing conflicts often ‘involved in disaster neighbouring villages in British territory’.101 Gunnel Cederlöf has argued that this expansionism on the part of Tripura’s rulers stemmed from an attempt to maximise territorial claims, in a context where the British operated through conceptions of welldemarcated territorial authority and borders. Hence, ‘knowing that boundaries were about to be fixed, the rulers of Manipur and Tripura made claims in a language they knew appealed to the British. Both claimed sovereignty .’102

The Rebellion of 1857, which famously raged across much of northern and central India, also gave an opportunity to various militant groups in northeastern India to strike against British rule.103 A significant instigating role was played by Indian sepoys who had rebelled against the British at Chittagong, on the Bengal-Burma frontier, and moved across the north-east frontier, often accompanied by female family members in male garb. They made alliances with members of the ‘hill-tribes’ of Tripura, including the Kukis as well as the Tripuris (in colonial nomenclature, Tipperahs), sometimes by giving money to the latter.104 The tribesmen had their own reasons to be disaffected with the existing political order, and especially with the ruler Ishanchandra Manikya. One factor, outlined above, was the Tripura state’s attempts to reduce the autonomy of the Kukis. But even those tribesmen who were better integrated into Tripura’s polity had reasons to be irritated with the ruler, who had of late often reduced their salaries, taken away their posts, or made regular and rigorous fiscal exactions from them. So the tribesmen hesitated to fight for the prince.105 A hill-tribesman who was ‘a sort of Sirdar of Lathials in Independent Tipperah’, and had broken out of jail, helped mobilise the Kukis, ‘causing disturbances in the country’.106 The British looked for help from Ishanchandra, but the latter hesitated to take action against the rebels until almost the last moment when they were on the brink of moving into Agartala, Tripura’s capital city. In colonial eyes, Ishanchandra was passive, unfit to govern his kingdom and (in the gendered vision of empire) timid as a girl.107 The kingdom’s weaknesses were evident even after the suppression of the 1857 rebellion. In 1860, a British official remarked that the ruler’s ‘Government is weak, and every head of a separate Tribe is hardly less powerful in the Hills than the Chief himself’.108

Though many British officials denounced Ishanchandra, in fact colonial policies – and especially the fiscal and budget-management pressure on the ruler (who also held extensive zamindari lands in British Bengal) – had themselves

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weakened the prince. A former Commissioner of the Chittagong Division noted that Ishanchandra had earlier possessed a significant military force, but due to his debts, he had to reduce the size of his military and police. Various members of his family had fallen into poverty, while ‘large exactions are being made everywhere upon the Tenantry’; hence ‘the Government of the Rajah is powerless, unpopular, and beset with hostile Chiefs, driven by want into alliances with the Tribes, who are fast usurping all authority and power in the Hills’.109 Other British officials offered variant diagnoses about the conflicts between the ruler and the tribesmen, including focusing on attacks made on the Kukis by the ruler’s men110 as well as on the resentment felt by the hillpeople against taxes, and especially monetary taxes, in a social context where trade often happened through barter rather than through cash transactions.111

Whatever be the primary cause of disorder, the British ultimately veered to the view that they needed to create a strong monarchic structure of rulership in this borderland: the elimination of succession conflicts was to be an important imperial goal through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.112 As mentioned before, the British were also concerned about getting regular revenues from the raja. As elsewhere in India, British desire to create an efficient landlord system shaped the nature of kingship in Tripura as well, favouring monocentric concentration of power in the ruler over polycentric ‘tribal’ decentralisation. The rulers themselves acquiesced in this reframing of kingship, as they increasingly presented themselves to the British as capable monarchs with impeccable high-status genealogy.113 A symbolic articulation of this dynasticisation process is visible in the way in which Ishanchandra’s successor, Birchandra Manikya, presented a copy of the Rajamala to the visiting Prince of Wales in 1876.114 While discussing this construction of a genealogical line in Tripura, I have been deeply inspired by Indrani Chatterjee’s writings on the problems of royal succession in Tripura. Chatterjee focuses primarily on changes in marriage, gender and household structures, and the ways in which these were related to issues of royal legitimacy.115 She has impressively demonstrated the relation between distribution of power within royal households in late precolonial and early colonial Tripura – and more broadly across north-eastern India – and the polycentric distribution of power within the political systems themselves. As she summarises:

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Histories of Manipur, Tripura, Cachar, and Assam suggest a decentralization of military power in these centuries and its mustering under specific conditions by “royal” order. This decentralization of soldiering brought local households and peripheral regions into regular relationships with the kings and courts, and shaped the nature of social structures.116

Chatterjee’s work is exceptional in the sense that studies on Tripura’s colonial history often provide elaborate details of the succession conflicts but do not adequately dwell on the ideologies underlying the events. Nevertheless, I have, of course, drawn on these more empirically-oriented academic works too, since they offer detailed and invaluable information on political and economic history.117 In contrast to these latter works however, I use the succession disputes mainly to demonstrate their relation to changing intellectual perspectives on rulership and statehood, including and vitally in terms of connections between British and South Asian political thought. It is within the trajectory of colonially-aided monarchisation that I wish to locate Rabindranath Tagore’s (initially literary, and later, political) intervention into Tripura. The connections between the Tagore family and the Tripura princely lineage dated to the time of Rabindranath’s grandfather Dwarkanath (who had given political aid to the then raja), but intensified in the 1880s as Rabindranath drew close to Birchandra (thanks to the latter’s appreciation of Rabindranath’s poetry) and to other members of Tripura’s princely elite, including Mahimchandra Thakur. Rabindranath now wrote three significant works on Tripura: Mukuta (‘Crown’, 1885), Rajarshi (‘Sage King’, 1885–87), and Visarjana (‘Sacrifice’, 1890).118 These works idealised precolonial rulers and princes of Tripura as national monarchs who worked for the welfare of the land and for protecting the country from foreign (in Rajarshi and Visarjana, Mughal; in Mukuta, Arakanese, from the Bengal-Burma frontier) invasion. Rabindranath’s worldview clearly resembled British colonial perspectives, in terms of regarding a strong (male) monarch as essential to maintaining a kingdom’s security and protecting its borders. But he added to that an indigenising vision of national social and moral reform. Rajarshi and Visarjana thus heroised a ruler who achieved Tripura’s welfare against the machinations of a Brahmin head-priest who was supported by the ‘superstitious’ people. Rabindranath’s underlying message was that a strong king was necessary to reform a nation, if necessary by going against the tide of ‘unenlightened’ public opinion. Like the British, he too desired an end to succession conflicts. His

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solution was to celebrate a norm of male primogeniture, which drew in part on Indic epic ideals about the rule of a virtuous elder brother. Revealingly, all three of Rabindranath’s works on Tripura dwelt on succession wars that pitted brothers against each other. The figure of the reformist ruler Govindamanikya in Rajarshi, guided in the welfare and protection of Tripura by the saintly Bilvana Thakura, illumines the manner in which Rabindranath idealised the relationship between social reformers and princes.119

In framing his model of the reformer patriot king – who also strove against Brahmin priestly power – Rabindranath was inspired by European narratives of conflict between State and Church. This anti-clerical stance was likely influenced by the Protestant background to his Brahmo faith. In various historical essays, he suggested that Brahmins represented a conservative priestly ideal, which could be compared with the medieval Church as well as with Conservative politics in nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast, Kshatriyas resembled the Liberals of British politics, while, like medieval European knights, they embodied a heroic temperament. Rabindranath also argued that the struggle between Brahmins and Kshatriyas in ancient India resembled that between Popes and Kings in Europe. The poet felt that, in India, the Kshatriya class had championed the destruction of social hierarchies, since such divisions were meaningless in the context of war camaraderie; they had also supposedly brought about the unity of Aryans and non-Aryans. He suggested that it was due to their Kshatriya background that rulers and sages like Janaka, Vishvamitra, Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Mahavira could challenge Brahmanical elitism and preach the doctrine of unity and salvation through knowledge and love. By championing the cause of the lower classes and by bringing down racial and social divisions, Kshatriyas had thus allegedly contributed to forming the Indian nation.120 As in case of Vivekananda, Rabindranath’s transposition of the European Church-State binary to Indian history, along with his proximity to a princely state, contributed to a political vision that saw in Indian rulers an agent of national progress. Rabindranath’s close links with Tripura represented one strand of a broader convergence between the princely state and the Bengali middle classes who increasingly found administrative offices in the kingdom. In the late 1880s, J. C. Price, the ex-officio Political Agent for Tripura,121 was irritated enough by this Bengali ascendancy to attempt a reduction of Birchandra’s powers.122 Price felt that the raja was totally controlled by ‘obnoxious Bengalis’ who drained

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away the state’s resources. Condemning ‘the all-absorbing, all-grasping, overpaid Bengali officials’, he advised that the yuvaraja or heir-apparent should be made Regent, and he was to be assisted in governing the princely state by a Bengali Minister. A European Manager was however to administer the ruler’s (financially lucrative) zamindari lands. There was a clear colonial logic of revenue maximisation behind Price’s stand. He felt that the zamindari income should pay for ‘Government revenue, cesses, and collection expenses’, and for ‘liquidation of the bonded and other debts due in British territory’.123 In fact, Birchandra had problems in satisfying the British about his cess124 as well as revenue exactions. From an imperial perspective, it seemed that: […] the tenants in collusion with the Amla rob him [the ruler] in every possible way, withholding payment of dues, creating rent-free holdings, concealing lands, and paying rents at generally very low rates. There are no accounts in his sherista to show either the quantities of lands held by the ryots or the amounts of jama for which they are liable.125

The nationalist press in Bengal reacted with furore towards such suggestions of curtailing Birchandra’s power.126 The Dacca Prakash thought that the underlying conflict was one about forest duties: the raja refused to raise these in his state, thereby offering a refuge to people from British Bengal whenever the British threatened to raise these duties.127 The Sanjivani gave more importance to British racial animus against Bengalis.128 The Political Agency cited such reports in the ‘native press, both of Calcutta and mofussil’ to argue before the British government against the ‘interested parties’ who were allegedly instigating them.129 The Government of Bengal, and especially the Lieutenant-Governor, thought that Birchandra ‘was reducing the revenues of the State’ by alienating his properties: to prevent this they advocated for a European Manager.130 After significant controversy, Birchandra was allowed to stay in charge, but a Bengali official, trusted by the British, was appointed as Minister in 1890.131 What these events did demonstrate was the British desire to create a powerful revenueextracting kingship in Tripura that would administer and keep secure the borderland according to colonial principles of good governance. Ishanchandra and Birchandra had both failed to meet British expectations on various counts. The reign of Radha Kishore, who came to the throne after Birchandra’s death in 1896, saw another manifestation of the British drive towards monarchising governance in Tripura; only Radha Kishore could manipulate the situation far more adroitly to his advantage.

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The principal crisis in the late 1890s and 1900s centred on succession, pitting Radha Kishore, who wanted to make his son Birendra Kishore the yuvaraja, against Radha Kishore’s brother Samarendra Chandra who pressed his claim before the British for this position of the heir apparent on the basis of the title of Bara Thakur granted to him by Birchandra. Radha Kishore responded with a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, he insisted to the British about the incumbent ruler’s right to select his successor. On the other hand, he also sought to mobilise Bengali public opinion, taking especially the help of Mahimchandra.132 This was motivated by the fact that prominent newspapers in Bengal had started campaigning for Samarendra Chandra, often driven by an anti-colonial rationale.133 The Dacca Prakash, for example, alleged that Radha Kishore, to ingratiate himself with the British by increasing the revenue collection, had robbed his relatives and dependents of their miras taluks (a form of landed property), and had taken away the forests and ghats which had been leased to Samarendra Chandra’s maternal uncle. The British had duly praised him as a model ruler.134 The leading nationalist newspaper of Bengal, The Bengalee, also supported Samarendra Chandra. British administrators, including Viceroy Curzon, were disturbed by these Indian press reports and wanted a quick and smooth resolution of the dynastic crisis.135 Radha Kishore was in the end successful in getting support from prominent Bengali figures like the maharaja of Natore, a leading Bengali zamindar, and the barrister Ashutosh Chaudhuri (who was related by marriage to Rabindranath). The barrister and Indian nationalist leader Ananda Mohan Bose refused to give legal counsel to Samarendra Chandra, while the nationalist newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika also ceased to support him. It has been argued that Rabindranath played a covert, but decisive, role in bringing about this turn in the tide.136 The poet staged, and acted in, a performance of Visarjana as an offering to Radha Kishore when the latter visited Calcutta in 1900. Rabindranath’s literary condemnation of fraternal wars of succession thus found a startling valence in Tripura’s contemporary politics. The poet also composed a song in eulogy of Radha Kishore on this occasion, describing him as a king of kings (raj-adhiraj) who removed the sorrows of the poor, was garlanded with victory and was feted by the civic goddess of Tripura (Tripurpuralakshmi) herself.137 Radha Kishore was equally successful in persuading the British to support him by suggesting that both kulachar (lineage custom) and Hindu law validated his stance. Even more strategic was the argument that the presence of more than

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one potential successor would lead to the emergence of multiple courts in the state, resulting in ‘intrigues’ which would ‘have a bad effect on the servants of the State and on its general progress’.138 The British ultimately set aside Samarendra Chandra’s claim.139 The British had their own rationale for privileging a norm of father-son succession in Tripura (and its associated zamindari holdings). Many British officials disliked the way in which succession conflicts allowed armed communities like the Kukis to augment their power. A primogenitureembedded dynastic system offered to them a way to lift Tripura out of savagery into modern civilization. The British also cited Manipur, whose ruling family intermarried with Tripura’s, as a precedent. They blamed the absence of proper dynastic norms for creating power tussles in the state, climaxing in the violent anti-British rebellion of 1890–91. The colonial response, of instituting dynastic primogeniture in Manipur to stabilise the polity, was now attempted on Tripura. And finally, the British compared political succession to property inheritance, and regarded father-to-son transmission of power, as much as of property, as the desirable norm.140

In precolonial India, by contrast, primogeniture had always had a contested status. Richard Eaton underlines the absence of a stable primogeniture system in the Delhi Sultanate and in the Mughal Empire.141 Richard Fox suggests that in precolonial northern Indian Rajput societies, norms of political as well as property inheritance were contingently dependent on the ever-changing power balance between the royal centre and the dispersed segments of the wider ruling lineage and polity.142 Such diversities in succession fascinated nineteenthcentury British observers too. Henry Maine felt that Hindus practiced primogeniture in relation to ‘public office’ or ‘political power’ but not for property inheritance, while Indo-Muslim rulers preferred nominating their successors.143 Alfred Lyall suggested that even Hindus (such as Rajputs) sometimes jettisoned dynastic primogeniture to allow for the clan to choose the most able candidate as ruler. A divine ‘aureole’ surrounded ruling clans as a whole, rather than the singular person of the ruler; Lyall conceptualised this as ‘tribal sovereignty’. Contrastively, the British insistence on primogeniture and dynastic regularity expressed a ‘modern spirit’ and ‘the necessities of orderly administration’,144 mirroring ‘the tendency of modern officialism […] to strengthen the sovereign against the nobles’. Lyall compared British interventions to the way in which Russians and Austrians had caused the demise of the ‘tumultuous’ politics of the Polish Diet and nobility.145

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In practical terms, Smita Tewari Jassal has shown how the British instituted primogeniture among taluqdar (landed magnate) families of Awadh in 1869, intending to build a stable collaborator class (Awadh had been a major centre of anti-British rebellion in 1857). Thereby, they disempowered younger male kin and women, who had earlier enjoyed greater inheritance and/or management powers over land thanks to Hindu and Muslim laws or customs.146 The British effort to introduce primogeniture among Gujarat’s ruling families met with greater resistance,147 while their efforts in princely Bhopal in the 1920s failed thanks to the Begum’s opposition.148 Male primogeniture offered to the colonial state a technique of introducing centralised concepts of state sovereignty in India, replacing earlier polycentric forms of power. But a major problem in Tripura was the absence of clear definitions of legal marriage; British policy threatened the status of a spectrum of sexual unions.149 In fact, Radha Kishore, through his minister, insisted on his right to choose his heir; this was supposedly the kulachar or family custom of Tripura.150 To complicate matters, a prince now claimed the heirship as the ruler’s eldest son, and challenged Birendra Kishore’s legitimacy. The British realised the potential of primogeniture to engender further disputes.151 Altering its stance, the Government of India gave the raja the right to select his successor.152

To streamline succession, the British desired to exclude succession by or through women. They knew of uncomfortable precedents here. Rani Jhanoba (Jahnava Devi) had ruled as ‘chief’ of Tripura in the early 1780s; Rani Sumitra, as the dead ruler’s widow, had claimed the ruler’s office in 1813, though the British preferred the then Bara Thakur to her. Troubled by what they regarded as the absence of a Salic Law in Tripura, British officials urged the raja to agree to male succession and explicitly bar a female successor or a descendent through a daughter. The raja acquiesced.153 This change was part of a broader decline of queenship in Tripura. Though structured by male-dominated narratives, the Rajamala extolled various queens in Tripura’s history. For example, Tripurasundaridevi led the kingdom’s army in war against Bengal in 1240, enlarging the state. Kamala (late-fifteenth early-sixteenth century) and Punyavati (sixteenth century) were renowned for excavation of tanks and land grants. Jaya (sixteenth century) pressured her father (who had assumed the throne by killing her husband) to exile himself. Gunavati (seventeenth century) sealed an alliance between Reang tribesmen and the state by protecting the Reangs from her husband Govindamanikya’s wrath and by symbolically

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adopting them as her children.154 Colonial interventions partially eclipsed this activist strain of queenship.

The Viceroy ultimately issued a sanad in 1904, stating that the rulership of Tripura ‘is and shall ever be hereditary in the Deb Barman family of Hill Tippera of which His Highness Radha Kishore Manikya, the present Chief of the said State, is now the lawful and acknowledged Head’. The Chief ‘for the time being may, from time to time, and at any time, nominate and constitute any male member of the said family descended through males from him, or any male ancestor of his, to be his Jubraj or Successor to the said Chiefship.’ If the ruler died without having nominated a successor, then he would be succeeded by ‘his nearest male descendant descended through males according to the rule of lineal primogeniture, and in default of such descendant his nearest male heir descended through males from any male ancestor of his […]’.155 In 1908, Rabindranath published a new version of Mukuta, a text which celebrated male primogeniture and the authority of the elder brother over the younger, and mirrored on a literary plane the victory of Radha Kishore over Samarendra Chandra. In 1909, Birendra Kishore became ruler after Radha Kishore’s death. Colonial policies ultimately led to the demise of fluid and indeterminate power lines and the construction of a proper ‘dynastic’ structure in Tripura which augmented the raja’s authority. This was based on selective interpretation of kulachara or kaulika pratha, a ‘Salic Law’ system of male primogeniture and the exclusion of women, and the exclusion of the kin-lineage and the broader militant populace from their earlier interventionist powers. Samarendra Chandra had a point when he complained that the raja, ‘under the plea that he is at liberty to do what he likes’, ‘owing to the British Government keeping the shield of perpetual peace alike over the Rajah and the ryots and thereby making foreign war and internal discord impossible’, ‘attempts acts which in former days would have driven his subjects to rebellion or brought about the summary and drastic interference of the Mahomedan Emperors’ .156 Contrastively, Rabindranath supported the building of a powerful monarchic rulership in Tripura, while British India under Viceroy Curzon proved inhospitable to Indian nationalist aspirations. In letters to Radha Kishore in the 1900s, he emphasised the unnati (improvement, development) of Tripura.157 Given India’s colonial subjection, Rabindranath felt that Indian princes were especially responsible for strengthening the national society (svadeshi samaj). Radha Kishore was urged to instantiate classical Hindu governmental ideals of

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rajadharma, with Maharashtra under Peshwa rule (as described by Mahadev Govind Ranade) and Mysore as exemplars.158 He was to protect Tripura from British loans and related interventions.159 In a note on Tripura’s budget, Rabindranath suggested that Tripura’s government lacked discipline and unity; it needed an all-powerful government (apratihata shasanatantra), which would concentrate royal powers in one centre (ekti kendre punjibhuta). He further advocated a (Western-type) division between the royal household and the general administration; a minister (mantri) should oversee the latter, if the ruler did not want to assume direct responsibility. The main point was to transform a fragmented and internally divisive (atmavirodha) power structure into a unified one; it did not matter whether the ruler himself or his minister was in actual charge of the everyday business of state.160 Rabindranath’s ideal of reformist-patriotic kingship is further evident in letters he wrote to Radha Kishore’s son Brajendra Kishore in the 1900s and early 1910s. Invoking precolonial Indian ideals of Kshatriya rulership, ascetic poverty, self-control, justice and popular welfare, the poet encouraged cultivation of virtue and rejection of Western material luxuries. Rather than being dependent on British consumer goods, Tripura was to develop its own forest and mining resources. Rabindranath imagined himself here as a Brahmin adviser of Kshatriya royalty.161

In 1905, at a public meeting in the state capital Agartala (where Radha Kishore was present), Rabindranath outlined that every nation (desha) had its own route to excellence (utkarsha); India could thus not merely imitate Western ways. Rather than British parliamentarianism and commercialisation, India should focus on the valour (virya) which was celebrated in Tripura’s state motto; it should prioritise national art and manufacture. For Rabindranath, colonial rule was emblematised in the ‘mechanical’ and impersonal exploitation of the office, the factory and the state. Contrastively, the native state (deshiya rajya) was like a household, protecting the people through male valour and maternal affection: There would have been no objection if we could have easily accepted the foreign burden, if we did not feel it as a burden, if the polity (rajya) did not sweat every moment in its attempt to become a mere office (apish), if what is related to the capillaries of the living heart were not connected to mechanical pipes (kaler pipe). Our native states (desher rajya) are not huge factories (karkhana) run by clerks. They are not faultless uniform engines (enjin). Their diverse relational networks are not iron rods. They are arteries

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of the heart. The royal goddess (rajalakshmi) enlivens their dry work every moment. What is hard, she softens. What is lowly, she makes beautiful. She brightens with the beauty of welfare (kalyana) matters of give-and-take. In the tears of forgiveness, she pardons mistakes. We desire that our ill fate should not convert our native states into machines (kal) in the mould of foreign offices. In these places, let us continue to receive the living and tender maternal touch of the milk-moist soothing breasts of the goddess of our nation (svadeshalakshmi). Let the mother not be covered here by some stamped papers. Let the nation’s language, the nation’s literature, the nation’s arts, the nation’s taste, and the nation’s beauty take shelter here in the mother’s lap. Let the nation’s power reveal itself very easily and very beautifully here, like a full moon free from clouds.162

For Rabindranath, the unity of this royal-national polity depended on its monarchic leader. He wrote to Radha Kishore in the early 1900s: Reform cannot be brought about by a multitude of people, since diverse people have diverse interests and opinions. Unity of all or of a majority is very difficult. In that case the opinion and influence of one who is supreme in the country can be effective.

He suggested the formation of regional councils where Indian princes would meet to deliberate on national welfare, especially in social reforms where British intervention might be unacceptable, as in marriage laws (Mysore was again the example) and in allowing foreign-returned Indians to be accepted into Hindu society.163 He also advocated Ramanimohan Chattopadhyay, the son-in-law of his elder brother, for the position of Minister in Tripura: Ramanimohan held office from 1905 to 1907.164 On Rabindranath’s advice, Radha Kishore financially patronised the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose165 and offered a pension to the aged poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay. Radha Kishore and his successors Birendra Kishore and Bir Bikram Kishore sponsored Brhat Vanga, a nationalist history of ‘Greater Bengal’, written by Rabindranath’s friend Dinesh Chandra Sen. The rulers financially assisted Rabindranath’s educational complex at Santiniketan; some members of Tripura’s elite were educated here. This complex, which developed into Visva-Bharati University, was interwar India’s most famous nationalist education project.166 In the promotion of science, literature, historiography and education, Tripura’s rulers thus conformed to Rabindranath’s expectations about the nation-making role of Indian princes.

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Nationalist discourses in turn came handy to Tripura’s princes in justifying their supposed autonomy from British rule in patriotic terms. This mattered even in the state’s nomenclature. While the British called the state Hill Tippera(h), the princes preferred the expression Svadhina Tripura or Independent Tripura, the prefixes ‘hill’ and ‘svadhina’ distinguishing the state from the district of the same name in British Bengal. In 1920, the British agreed to call the state Tripura.167 But the name Svadhina Tripura was used till 1949, when Tripura became part of the Indian Union.168 Tripura’s use of Bengali, rather than English, as the state language (rajbhasha) emblematised a comparable cultural opposition to colonial rule;169 hence also Rabindranath’s significance. On the poet’s eightieth birthday, the maharaja gave him the title ‘Bharat Bhaskar’ or sun of India. When Rabindranath died in 1941, Tripura’s offices, courts, schools and other government institutions were closed in mourning for a day.170 For Tripura’s Bengalis, who now form the demographic majority in the state, Rabindranath iconically connects the region with the Bengali/Indian nation.

2.4 Conclusion Through two detailed case studies, I have argued that the princely states offered to many Indian nationalists a space for imagining centralised sovereignty. In Cooch Behar, the late-nineteenth century saw British involvement in the princely administration, culminating in the colonially-mediated marriage between Nripendra Narayan and Sunity Devi, the daughter of Keshub Chunder Sen. This generated a monotheistic-monarchic political theology which supported social reform and economic transformation (revenue maximisation and infrastructure building) in Cooch Behar. Meanwhile Tripura witnessed contestations and dialogues between the colonial state, princely elites, martialpeasant communities (pre-eminently Tripuris and Kukis) and Bengali middle classes. The end-result was a British-induced monarchisation of princely authority, supported by new notions of dynastic legitimacy. In both states, the British wished to introduce governmental monopoly of power and revenue maximisation, replacing polycentric structures of authority and property. Protecting the external frontier (with Bhutan and on the north-east) also motivated these ‘monarchising’ projects. Colonial interventions partly reduced the power of royal kinsmen, princely women and martial-peasant groups. Indian nationalists had their own reasons for supporting this monarchisation. In both Tripura and Cooch Behar, the model of household sovereignty emerged

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as a critique of ‘modern’ forms of ‘abstract’ rule, such as the rule of the office and the factory, or of ideologies like republicanism and socialism. The princely household-state was projected as a space of unmediated charismatic face-to-face sovereignty, with the sovereign-prince acting as father and mother of the subject (in Keshub’s words, as ‘fathersovereign’). This was a kind of counter-modern vision which competed with ‘impersonal’ systems of economic extraction and elite parliamentary-conciliar politics. Politics as epiphany, as direct presentation of the sovereign, stood in visible contrast to the idea of politics as one of representation (through Parliament and constitution). Keshub and Rabindranath envisaged their own roles as ‘great men’ reformers who guided kings in an enlightened manner, mapping European discourses on ChurchState relation into their dealings with these states.

Yet this household-state vision emerged because of a prior colonial-modern centralisation of sovereign political, military and fiscal authority. The notion of personal charismatic sovereignty was as much a by-product of colonial modernity as the notion of impersonal governance. The discourse on personal family rule provided a foundation not for the negation of the administrative state, but rather as an additional pillar of legitimacy for the latter. The state could now act in a top-down manner to bring about political, ideological and economic transformations even more effectively because it could act as a benevolent parent and agent of divinity, rather than as a mere mechanical force. I have highlighted to what extent these imaginaries partook of modernist tropes such as the promotion of ‘advancement’, ‘reformation’, ‘progress’, ‘civilization’ and ‘enlightenment’ in the case of Keshub (words used by him in English), or of ‘excellence’, ‘improvement’ and ‘welfare’ (utkarsha, unnati, hita, which translated the European concepts into Bengali) in the case of Rabindranath. Here, ‘development’ was interpreted as a modernist technique which was enabled by top-down interventions, and not by the agonism of public sphere politics. Keshub mapped this through Christian theological concepts of ‘economy’, ‘special providence’ and ‘special dispensation’ which he celebrated in opposition to constitutional politics, to republicanism, to the government of the world through laws embedded in ‘general providence’. Tagore utilised more Sanskritic terms.171

Both Keshub and Rabindranath evoked the figure of Lakshmi, the Indian goddess who represents material and moral plenitude and welfare in the (patriarchal) household and in society; she associates and conflates the

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rectitude of household behaviour and prosperity with the well-being and governance of the broader social order. In Indian nationalist discourse, the nation was also sacralised and visualised as Lakshmi, as the rajalakshmi, the Lakshmi of the ruler or the kingdom, who was also the svadeshalakshmi, the Lakshmi of the nation. Behind them was the grhalakshmi, the Lakshmi of the household.172 Despite using such Indic concepts, these reformist projects were part of global conversations. This is clear from the networks of Keshub and his daughter and son-in-law with European royalty, from Keshub’s association with Christian (including Papal) vocabularies of infallible authority, and from the similarities between Rabindranath’s admiration for princely rule, and his ambiguous admiration for the Japanese emperor-cult, the Iranian monarch and Mussolini.173

These monarchising programmes did not go unchallenged. In the Cooch Behar case, this led to a break-up within the Brahmo movement in India; in case of Tripura, many Bengalis opposed colonial revenue maximisation and dynastic re-structuring policies. It is important to bear in mind the limits of princely projects of modernisation. Biswamoy Pati, drawing on native states of Orissa, suggests that princely paternalism was based on intensive revenue extraction, land domination, exploitation of subaltern (such as ‘tribal’) groups, and deployment of coercive apparatuses inflected by caste and gender stratification. Princely schemes of power often deepened the reach of colonialism in local economies, especially in acquiring mining and forest resources, and deploying labour.174 Indian elite reformist-nationalist interventions often only accentuated these extractive technologies. In Cooch Behar and Tripura, ‘reformism’ definitively shifted the balance of power in favour of upper-caste Bengalis, to the detriment of local communities.

Princely policies of initiating social progress thus had clear structural limits, which were also exposed by popular movements against the regimes. Indian nationalist elites, especially those associated with the Congress, however took quite some time to turn critical towards these rulerships. In part, they wished to retain the princes as their allies and not to open up fissures within the Indian camp. Many nationalist politicians and intellectuals had strong personal connections with princely elites: Rabindranath offers a typical example, but so does Gandhi (whose father had been an official in a princely state). Like Rabindranath, Gandhi too distinguished between the mechanical and structural exploitation embodied in British colonial power, and the supposedly ‘personal’, and hence

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reformable, nature of Indian princely authority. If the British had made the princes irresponsible and bad rulers by suppressing avenues of reform and popular protest, Indians had to take the initiative in transforming these rulers back into benevolent trustees of the people.175 In this context, the ascendancy of left nationalism within Congress politics from the 1930s, epitomised by figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, represented a paradigm shift, as the Congress grew more convinced about the need to connect to, and appropriate, popular struggles in the native states. This trajectory culminated in the dissolution of the princely order after 1947.176 The graduated, but ultimately radical, transformation in Indian nationalist attitudes is captured in a fascinating part of Nehru’s autobiography. The description can be read as a confession of Nehru’s covert admiration for ‘Indian’ chivalry, a species of male romantic affect bound to the political spaces of the princely states, and, simultaneously, as a marker of a mature ‘adult’ disdain for these states. The states became signifiers of the Indian nationalist’s, as well as of India’s, childhood. They were cast as territories which possessed a certain aestheticised significance for the initial imagining of the Indian nation. But the ‘mature’ nation, as it came of age, needed to relegate these spaces to the past, to the nostalgia of boyhood, to the domain of the oneiric rather than of the real, even as it prioritised democracy: The Indian States represent to-day probably the extremest type of autocracy existing in the world. […] It is really astonishing how these feudal oldworld enclaves have carried on with so little change right into the middle of the twentieth century. The air is heavy and still there, and the waters move sluggishly, and the newcomer, used to change and movement and a little weary of them perhaps, feels a drowsiness, and a faint charm steals over him. It all seems unreal, like a picture where time stands still and an unchanging scene meets the eye. Almost unconsciously he drifts back to the past and to his childhood's dreams, and visions of belted and armoured knights and fair and brave maidens come to him, and turreted castles and chivalry and quixotic ideas of honour and pride and matchless courage and scorn of death. Especially if he happens to be in Rajputana, that home of romance and of vain and impossible deeds. But soon the visions fade and a sense of oppression comes; it is stifling and difficult to breathe, and below the still or slow-moving waters there is stagnation and putrefaction. One feels hedged, circumscribed, bound down in mind and body. And one sees the utter backwardness and misery of the people, contrasting vividly with the glaring ostentation of the prince’s palace.177

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In the face of popular movements and left-nationalist critiques, the princes often tried to reinvent themselves as sponsors of Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh sectarian-nationalist politics, or as patrons of various caste organizations. Some of them projected themselves as moral guardians and militant defenders of particular communities. Such postures and interventions often exacerbated sectarian conflicts, especially in Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Hyderabad. In the years leading up to Independence and Partition of India, princely elites sometimes encouraged violence, and occasionally promoted massacres, directed against religious communities which they saw as threats to their own confessions and political legitimacy. However, such attempts at confessionalised hegemony-building could not shield the princely order from eventual dissolution.178 It would be premature however to write off the impact of the princely states. In parts of South Asia, and especially in Tripura, Cooch Behar, Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir and Balochistan, traditions of political autonomy inherited from the princely era have provided a ground for powerful movements for political independence until today.179 I have also suggested less obvious forms of political inheritance, especially in the realm of concepts: in discussions on top-down development and economy; notions of asymmetrical modernisation; interpretations of monistic sovereignty and monotheistic theology; and debates on ‘personal’ rule and charismatic leadership, all of which left traces in the making of mainstream Indian politics and intellectual production. Peasant community discourses, as Chapter 4 will show, also often evolved by appropriating as well as challenging these vocabularies of princely rulership. Further studies on other princely states will deepen our understanding of modern Indian intellectual history as more information comes to light about the impact of these states on South Asian nationalist discourses on sovereignty, theology and political economy. ­­­

Endnotes 1 Voltaire, Fragments, 11–12. 2

James Tod (1782–1835) was a British (Scottish) officer in India, who is remembered for his writings on Rajput history. See James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, vol. 1–2, Delhi: Rupa, 2008 (1829–32); Norbert Peabody, ‘Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India’, Modern Asian Studies 30(1) 1996:185–220; Jason Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan, Brill: Leiden, 2009.

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3

Letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Tod to T. Hyde Villiers, 23 March 1832, in HCPP, 1831–1832, Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company; with minutes of evidence in six parts, and an appendix and index to each, VI. Political or Foreign, Appendix 13, 131–32; see also 125 on Tod’s criticism of the Company’s application of ‘our own monarchical principles to a dissimilar form of government’. 4 Testimony of James Mill, 16 February 1832, HCPP, 1831–1832, Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company; with minutes of evidence in six parts, and an appendix and index to each, VI. Political or Foreign, Minutes of Evidence, 6. 5 Cohn, ‘Representing Authority’. 6 Inden, Imagining India, 176–80. 7 See also: Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron-Client System, 1914–1939, Columbus: Ohio State University Press for the University of Cincinnati, 1978; Ian Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1857–1930, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1982; S. R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States, 1905–1939, London: Curzon Press, 1982; Robert W. Stern, The Cat and the Lion: Jaipur State in the British Raj, Leiden: Brill, 1988; Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Manu Bhagavan, ‘Princely States and the Making of Modern India: Internationalism, Constitutionalism and the Postcolonial Moment’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46(3) 2009: 427–56. 8 Henry Sumner Maine, International Law: The Whewell Lectures, London: John Murray, 1890, 57–59; also cited by William Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India, London: Macmillan and Co., 1894, 30–31, 327–28. Maine (1822–88) was a British legal thinker; he served in India as Law Member in the Viceroy’s Council from 1862 to 1869. John Austin (1790–1859) was a British legal and political philosopher. On Maine’s critique of Austin in relation to shifting notions of imperial indirect rule: Anthony Pagden, ‘Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires’, History and Theory 44(4) 2005: 28–46. 9 Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764– 1858, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, 445. 10 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 11 Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 12 Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education, and Empire in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. 13 Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal, London: Routledge, 2007. 14 Nile Green, ‘Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies 72(3) 2013: 611–31. 15 Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011; quotes from 2 and 16.

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 149 16 Angma Dey Jhala, Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. 17 See, for example, Ramusack, Indian Princes. 18 Shruti Kapila, ‘Masculinity and Madness: Princely Personhood and Colonial Sciences of the Mind in Western India 1871–1940’, Past and Present 187(1) 2005: 121–56. 19 I. F. S. Copland, ‘The Baroda Crisis of 1873–77: A Study in Governmental Rivalry’, Modern Asian Studies 2(2) 1968: 97–123; Uma Dasgupta, Rise of an Indian Public: Impact of Official Policy, 1870–1880, Calcutta: Riddhi, 1977, 190–231; Amritalal Basu, Hiraka-Churna Nataka, Calcutta: Amritalal Basu, 1875. Amritalal Basu (1853–1929) was a noted Bengali playwright. 20 Dutt, Economic History, 32. Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909) was a member of the Indian Civil Service, and subsequently became a ‘Moderate’ Indian nationalist critical of colonial economic exploitation. 21 Ian Copland, ‘The Dilemmas of a Ruling Prince: Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwar and “Sedition”’, in Rule, Protest, Identity: Aspects of Modern South Asia, edited by P. Robb and D. Taylor, London: Curzon Press, 1978, 28–48; Charles W. Nuckolls, ‘The Durbar Incident’, Modern Asian Studies 24(3) 1990: 529–59. 22 Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 5, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1990, 211, 228. Sarala Devi (1872–1945) was a pioneer female nationalist from Bengal. 23 Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 4, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1987, 262. 24 Sarojini Naidu, Speeches and Writings, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., n.d. (3rd Edition), 61–62. Sarojini Naidu (née Chattopadhyaya) (1879–1949) was an Indian nationalist leader, poet and pioneer activist in campaigning for women’s education and voting rights. 25 Vivekananda, ‘Historical Evolution of India’ and ‘Letter to Mary Hale, 1 November 1896’ in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 6, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1972, 160–63, 381; Vivekananda, ‘Letter to Raja Ajit Singh Bahadur of Khetri’ (1895) and ‘Letter to the Maharaja of Mysore, 23 June 1894’, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 4, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1972, 321–30, 361–64; Nivedita, ‘Notes of Some Wanderings with Swami Vivekananda’ (1906–10, 1913) in Complete Nivedita, vol. 1, 291–92. Price, Kingship, examines why Indian landed magnates (in her study, the zamindar of Ramnad) projected themselves as kingly patrons of moral-national activities; she refers briefly to Vivekananda in 168. 26 Maruti T. Kamble, ‘Bengal in Karnataka’s Religious Reform Movement: A Case Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, 1890–1947’, in Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, edited by Gwilym Beckerlegge, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, 125–43. 27 Robin Jeffrey, The Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847–1908, London: Sussex University Press, 1976; James Manor, Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore 1917–1955, Delhi: Manohar, 1977; David Hardiman, ‘Baroda: The Structure of a ‘Progressive’ State’, in People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, edited by Robin Jeffrey, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978, 107–35; Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres; Ramusack, Indian Princes, 174–79. For an example of such a project of creating representative institutions, see my discussion on Tripura in Chapter 4.

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28 P. C. Mozoomdar, The Life and Teachings of Keshub Chunder Sen, Calcutta: J. W. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1887, 441–42. 29

Harendra Narayan Chaudhuri, The Cooch Behar State and its Land Revenue Settlements, Cooch Behar: Cooch Behar State Press, 1903, 287–90, 418–21. Sunity Devi (1864– 1932) is discussed in detail in chapter 3.

30 Jhala, Indian Women, 44, 57; Ramusack, Indian Princes, 180–82.

31 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 287 (citing Letter from Major W. Agnew, Offg. Agent of the Governor-General for the North-East Frontier, 15 January 1864).

32 Ibid., 4, 243–48, 263–66, 273, 279–80, 283–84, 287; Jayanath Munshi, Rajopakhyana, Calcutta: Mala Publications, 1989 (1823–33); Bhagabaticharan Bandyopadhyay, Koch Biharer Itihasa, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2006 (1882); Khan Chowdhury Amanatullah Ahmed, Koch Biharer Itihasa, vol. 1, Siliguri: N. L. Publishers, 2005 (1936); Durgadas Majumdar, Koch Bihar, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1977; Biswanath Das and Subhendu Majumdar (ed.), Princely Cooch Behar: A Documentary Study on Letters (1790–1863 AD), Calcutta: Pioneer Publishers, 1990; B. G. Karlsson, Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal, Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000, 69–73. 33 A. C. Sinha, Himalayan Kingdom Bhutan: Tradition, Transition and Transformation, Delhi: Indus Publishing Company, 2004; Marian Gallenkamp, The History of Institutional Change in the Kingdom of Bhutan: A Tale of Vision, Resolve, and Power, Heidelberg: South Asia Institute, Department of Political Science, Heidelberg University, 2011; Ngawang Drakpa, ‘Royal Coronations: Windows upon Historical Transition in Bhutan, 1907–2008’, National University of Singapore MA Dissertation, 2013; Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan, Gurgaon: Random House India, 2014. 34 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 296 (quoting Mr. Beveridge, Annual Report for 1865–67). 35 Ibid., 298.

36 Ibid. (see 509 for the definition of jotedar as one who paid revenue directly to the princely government); Bandyopadhyay, Koch Biharer Itihasa. Of recent historical scholarship, I have been especially stimulated by Partha Sen, ‘Kochbihar Rajyer Banik Pnuji theke Aupaniveshik Yuge Uttarankal’, Uttar Prasanga 5(6) 2011: 38–44; Partha Sen, ‘Nripendranarayaner Rajatve Kochbihar Rajyer Bhumi-Rajasva Vyavasthar Vivartan’, in Janma Sardha-Shatavarshe Prajavatsal Maharaja Nripendranarayan Bhupa, edited by Debabrata Chaki, Koch Bihar: Uttar Prasanga, 2013, 161–65. 37 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 297–98.

38 Calica Doss Dutt, ‘Introduction’, in ibid.,6.

39 On the controversy, see: Mozoomdar, Life and Teachings, 260–63, 321–38, 441–49; Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, vol. 1, Calcutta: R. Chatterji, 1911, 256–306; Gour Govinda Roy, Acharya Keshavachandra, vol. 2, Calcutta: Navavidhan Press, 1938 (1893), 1180–290; Sunity Devi, Autobiography of an Indian Princess: Memoirs of Maharani Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar, Delhi: Tarang Paperbacks, 1995 (1921); Dwijadas Datta, Behold the Man or Keshub and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Calcutta, 1930, 68–158; Bipin Pal, Memories, 315, 332–47; Prosanto Kumar Sen, Keshub Chunder Sen and the Cooch Behar Betrothal, 1878, Calcutta: The Book Company,

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 151 1933; David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, 324, 327–29. The most comprehensive and incisive recent academic analysis of Keshub Chunder Sen can be found in John A. Stevens, ‘Colonial Subjectivity: Keshab Chandra Sen in London and Calcutta, 1870–1884’, University College London PhD Dissertation, 2011. While some of the political-theological issues discussed in this section are also occasionally analysed by Stevens, his main focus is not on discourses of rulership and sovereignty, and neither does he foreground the political developments in Cooch Behar itself: desiderata which my book addresses.

40 Rochona Majumdar, ‘A Nineteenth-Century Debate: Law versus Rituals’, in Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 167–205.

41 Apart from the sources mentioned above, see: Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. 132, Proceedings Nos. 18–19, 20, August 1878, ‘Report of the Marriage of the Rajah of Cooch Behar with the Daughter of Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen’ (The Political Department files till 1900 are incorporated with the Judicial Proceedings in the West Bengal State Archives). 42 Sastri, History, 265, also 291. Sivanath Sastri (1847–1919) was a Bengali Brahmo reformer who helped in the emergence of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. 43

Letter from Babu Shib Chunder Deb to Babu Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, Assistant Secretary, Brahmo Samaj of India, 18 May 1878, in ibid., lxx.

44 Ibid., lxvi.

45 Bipin Pal, Memories, 343. Ananda Mohan Bose (1847–1906) was a Brahmo reformer and nationalist politician.

46 On the use of the term ‘economy’ in this theological-governmental sense, see Keshub Chunder Sen, The New Dispensation or The Religion of Harmony, Compiled from Keshub Chunder Sen’s Writings, Calcutta: Bidhan Press, 1903, 135–36, 230, 245–46, 253; The New Dispensation or The Religion of Harmony, Compiled from Keshub Chunder Sen’s Writings, vol. 2, Calcutta: Brahmo Tract Society, 1910, 66–67, 168–69, 211, 245; Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, London: Cassell and Co., 1904, 16, 21, 23, 46, 92, 313, 317, 355. On the European theological genealogies of the term ‘economy’, see Agamben, Kingdom. 47 Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 66–67. 48 Ibid.,168.

49 Sen, Lectures in India, 313–18. 50 Sen, New Dispensation, 135. 51 Ibid.,136.

52 Ibid., 230–32.

53 Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 54 Sen, New Dispensation, 3–4.

55 Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 246–53.

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56 Sen, New Dispensation, 207, 302; Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 36, 194–97, 201. 57 Sen, Lectures in India, 92.

58 Sophia Dobson Collet (ed.), Keshub Chunder Sen’s English Visit, London: Strahan and Co., 1871, 198–99. 59 Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 259–64.

60 Keshub Chunder Sen, Great Men: Being the Substance of a Lecture Delivered ExTempore at the Town Hall on the 28th September, 1866, Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press Company, 1868, 11. 61 Ibid, 22. 62 Ibid, 10. 63 Ibid., 6.

64 Ibid., 6–8. 65 Ibid., 25

66 Keshub Chunder Sen, Discourses and Writings, Calcutta: Brahmo Tract Society, 1904, 4. 67 Letter of Keshub Chunder Sen to Miss Cobbe, 29 April 1878, in Sen, Cooch Behar Betrothal, 13.

68 Keshub Chunder Sen, The New Samhita, or Sacred Laws of the Aryans of the New Dispensation, Calcutta: Brahmo Tract Society, 1889, 45. Interestingly, Keshub generalised from his own daughter’s case to argue that betrothals could be allowed for anyone, even before the marriageable age, if they were ‘commended by Providence more for the union of races and the extension of His kingdom’ (Ibid., 50). 69 Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 64–65. 70 Collet (ed.), English Visit, 481–82. 71 Ibid., 610.

72 By 1872, Kopf (Brahmo Samaj, 325–27) estimates 102 Brahmo Samajes across India: 58 in Bengal proper, 10 in Madras Presidency, 8 in North-Western Provinces, 6 in Bombay Presidency, 5 in Bihar, 5 in Assam, 4 in Punjab, 2 in Orissa, 2 in Oudh, 1 in Central Provinces and 1 in Burma. 73 Joyoti Devi Kaye, Sucharu Devi, Maharani of Mayurbhanj: A Biography, Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop, 1979.

74 Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 65–66. 75 Ibid., 193.

76 In reading Keshub in this way, I have been much inspired by Agamben, Kingdom. 77 Sen, New Dispensation, vol. 2, 265–66. 78 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 426–30. 79 Ibid.,675–705.

80 Ibid.,423, 437; Sunity Devi, Autobiography; Biswanath Das, Maharani Suniti Devi, Calcutta: Shishu Sahitya Samsad, 2000; Gayatri Devi, A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur, Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2010 (1995). For details on Sunity Devi, see chapter 3.

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 153 81 See chapter 4.

82 On queenship in Cooch Behar, see Lucy Moore, Maharanis: A Family Saga of Four Queens, New York: Penguin Books, 2006; Mahendra Debnath, Atmakathane Kochbihar Maharani Brindeshvari o Jenkins School, Koch Bihar: Lekhapara, 2010; Uttar Prasanga (Focus: Ajnatabasini Uttaradevi), 7(10) 2013; Debabrata Chaki (ed.), Maharani Sunitidevi, Koch Bihar: Uttar Prasanga, 2013. 83 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 437. 84 Ibid., 675–705.

85 Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 328–29.

86 For analyses of Nripendra Narayan’s achievements as well as failures, see Kamalesh Chandra Das, ‘The Modernisation of a Princely State: Cooch Behar under Maharaja Nripendra Narayan (1863–1911)’, PhD Dissertation, North Bengal University, 1989; Chaki (ed.), Nripendranarayan. 87 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 411. 88 Ibid.,580.

89 Ibid., 320–21. On Victoria College, see Subhendu Majumdar, Adhunik Shiksha o Koch Bihar Victoria College (1888–1938), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 2000; Uttar Prasanga (Focus: Sardha-Shatavarshe Brajendranath Seal), 8(1)2014. 90 Swapan Kumar Ray, Kochbihar Rajdarbarer Sahityacharcha, Calcutta: Books Way, 2011; Sachindra Nath Roy, Sahitya Sadhanay Rajanya Shasita Kochbihar, Siliguri: N. L. Publishers, 2013. 91 Prajnaparamita Sarkar, ‘Adhunikata o Sanskrti: Prekshapat Karad Rajya Koch Bihar – Ekti Samiksha’, Uttar Prasanga 8(3) 2014:42–46.

92 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 342–44, 392–95. Interestingly, vaccination programmes achieved success when tailored to local habits, through the use of ‘indigenous inoculators’ to vaccinate in the modern method (343–44). 93 Ibid., 504–8.

94 Ibid., 340; also Mahendra Debnath, Shahar Kochbiharer Tinsha Bachhar, Koch Bihar: Lekhapara, 2007.

95 Panchanan Barma and Upendranath Barman, the two most important Rajavamshi politicians of the first half of the twentieth century, had both been educated in Victoria College. See Majumdar, Victoria College, 98–99. 96 Kaliprasanna Sen (ed.), Shrirajamala, vol. 1, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2003 (1336 TE/1926), 10–19, 53–54, 69–70; vol. 2, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2003 (1337 TE/1928), 6–8, 38–39; vol. 3, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2003 (1341 TE/1931), 57, 65. TE refers to the precolonial-origin Tripurabda or Tripura Era; translations into the Gregorian calendar have been adjusted according to the relevant month. 97 Kaliprasanna Sen, ‘Uttaradhikari Nirvachana Paddhati’, in Shrirajamala, vol. 1, 119– 20.

98 Shrirajamala, vol. 1, 14–17; vol. 2, 1–3, 77–78; Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Genealogy, History and the Law: The Case of the Rajamala’, in History and the Present, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002, 108–43.

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99 Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 37–41.

100 W. W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. 6, London: Trübner and Co., 1876, 460.

101 Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal, Calcutta: Home Department Press, 1884, 276. Mackenzie (1842–1902) was a British scholar-administrator who rose to the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.

102 Gunnel Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, 202–3.

103 In mapping the rebellion of 1857 in relation to Tripura, I have benefited from reading the manuscript of an essay by Sarmistha De (West Bengal State Archives), ‘Eastern Bengal and North East Frontier in 1857’. See also Hirendra Kumar Sur, British Relations with the State of Tripura, 1760–1947, Agartala: Naba Chandana Prakashani, 2010, 55–57. 104 Letter from the Judge of Tipperah, 23 November 1857, to C. J. Buckland, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 31 December 1857, Proceeding No. 659; Letter from the Assistant Magistrate and Collector of Tipperah, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 25 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 10 December 1857, Proceeding No. 208; Letter from the Offg. Joint Magistrate of Noakhally, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 28 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 10 December 1857, Proceeding No. 214; Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 28 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 205; Letter of H. C. Metcalfe, Judge of Tipperah, enclosed with Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 28 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 206; Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 30 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 212. 105 Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, Chittagong Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 4 December 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 215.

106 Letter of H. C. Metcalfe, Judge of Tipperah, enclosed with Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 28 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 206.

107 Ibid.; Letter from the Judge of Tipperah, to C. J. Buckland, 27 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 209; Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 30 November 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857,

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 155 Proceeding No. 212; Letter from Assistant Magistrate in Charge Tipperah to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 2 December 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 213; Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 3 December 1857, Proceeding Nos. 163–174, 176; Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit, Chittagong Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 4 December, 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 215; Letter from the Offg. Commissioner of Circuit, 16th Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 5 December 1857, in Judicial Department, Judicial Branch, Government of Bengal, 17 December 1857, Proceeding No. 217; Judicial-General Letters to the Court of Directors, Special Narrative, Fort William, January-June 1858, vol. 46, Nos. 53 and 71.

108 Mr. Steer, previous Officiating Commissioner of Chittagong Division, Letter No. 1A, 7 February 1860, quoted by Letter from W. S. Seton-Karr, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Officiating Commissioner of the Chittagong Division, No. 331A, 9 February 1861, in Judicial Proceedings, Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, February 1861, Prog. No. 124. 109 Ibid. On the raids, see also Judicial Proceedings, Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, February 1861, Progs. Nos. 120–124, 166, 182–186, and March 1861, Prog. No. 114. 110 Letter from Captain J. R. Margrath, Superintendent of the Hill Tribes, to W. S. Seton-Karr, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, in Judicial Department, Government of Bengal, May 1861, Prog. No. 17.

111 Letter from T. Smith, Officiating Joint Magistrate in charge of the Sylhet Magistrate’s Office, to the Commissioner of the Dacca Division, 25 January 1862, in Judicial Department, Government of Bengal, April 1862, Prog. No. 313. 112 For debates in the 1860s about rulership and succession in the context of preventing ‘tribal’ raids and rebellions, see: Judicial Department, Government of Bengal: March 1861, Prog. No. 114; April 1861, Progs. Nos. 242–244; Political Department, Government of Bengal: September 1862, Progs. Nos. 23–33; April 1863, Progs. Nos. 21–25; March 1865, Progs. Nos. 9–34, 35.

113 For nineteenth-century succession disputes, and their relation to British military and economic policy, see: Hunter, Statistical Account, vol. 6, 460–72; Mackenzie, North-East Frontier, 272–80; Administration Reports of the Political Agency, Hill Tipperah (shortened hereafter as Administration Reports of Hill Tipperah) for the Years 1872, 1874–75, 1877–78, in Administration Report of the Political Agency, Hill Tipperah, 1872–1878, edited by Dipak Kumar Chaudhuri, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1996, 21, 55, 115; Administration Report of Hill Tipperah for 1880–81 in Administration Report of the Political Agency, Hill Tipperah, 1878–79 – 1889–90, edited by Dipak Kumar Chaudhuri, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1996, 64.

114 Political Department, Government of Bengal, File No. (35)153, Proceeding Nos. B 318–20, 321, 322–23, 324, 325, 326, ‘Present from the Chiefs of Bengal to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’, abstract in Proceedings of July 1876 (original file destroyed). 115 Chatterjee, ‘Genealogy’; Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Gossip, Taboo, and Writing Family

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116 Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence’, in Slavery and South Asian History, edited by Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 288.

117 I have drawn especially on Dipak Kumar Chaudhuri, The Political Agents and the Native Raj: Conflict, Conciliation and Progress: Tripura between 1871 to 1890, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1999; Sur, British Relations, 74–80.

118 Gobindanarayan Chattopadhyay and Himangshunath Gangopadhyay (eds.), Ravindranatha o Tripura, Agartala: Tripura Anchalika Ravindrajanmashatavarshiki Samiti, 2011 (1961); Mahim Chandra Thakur (Debbarma), ‘Tripur Darbare Ravindranatha’ (1921), in Deshiya Rajya, Agartala: Tripura State Tribal Cultural Research Institute and Museum, Government of Tripura, 1996 (1928), 74–75; Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Jivanasmrti’ (1912), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989, 61; Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 3, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1987, 11–12; Kaliprasanna Sen (ed.), Shrirajamala, vol. 4, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2003, 172–76. 119 Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Mukuta’ in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 9, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1988, 9–22; ‘Mukuta’ in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1984, 583–604; ‘Rajarshi’ in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 7, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1985, 103–90; ‘Visarjana’ in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, 169–236. 120 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Bharatavarshe Itihaser Dhara’ (1911) in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 491–509; ‘Laraiyer Mula’ (1915), in ibid., 604–5.

121 In this period, the District Magistrate of the district of Tipperah in British Bengal served as the ex-officio Political Agent for Hill Tipperah/Tripura. 122 On the controversy of the 1880s, see Chaudhuri, The Political Agents; Sur, British Relations, 74–80.

123 Letter from J. C. Price, Magistrate and Political Agent, Tipperah, to the Commissioner of the Chittagong Division, no. 1483 – XVI – 11, Comillah, 28 June 1888, in Administration Report of Hill Tipperah for 1887–88, in Hill Tipperah, 1878–79 – 1889–90, 213–19; quotes from 216. 124 Administration Report of Hill Tipperah for 1887-88, in ibid., 220. 125 Administration Report of Hill Tipperah for 1888-89, in ibid., 239.

126 RNPB 1889: Dainik-o-Samachar Chandrika, 25 June; Aryavarta, 29 June; Navavibhakar Sadharani, 1 July; Sulabh Samachar-o-Kushdaha, 5 July; Dacca Gazette, 22 July; Surabhi o Pataka, 25 July, 2 August; Pratikar, 2 August; Praja Bandhu, 2 August; Sanjivani, 3 August, 10 August, 17 August, 24 August; Bharat Mitra, 29 August; Sanjivani, 7 September; Pratikar, 13 September; Samvad Prabhakar, 18 September; Hindu Ranjika, 18 September; Surabhi o Pataka, 19 September; Sanjivani, 21 September; Som Prakash, 23 September; Darussaltanat, 29 September. 127 RNPB: Dacca Prakash, 1 December 1889. 128 RNPB: Sanjivani, 22 July 1889.

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 157 129 Administration Report of Hill Tipperah for 1889-90, in Hill Tipperah, 1878–79 – 1889–90, 251. 130 Letter from John Edgar, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, in Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, Progs. July 1890, Nos. 185-95.

131 Letter from G. R. Irwin, Officiating Under-Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, to the Officiating Chief-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, in Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, Progs. July 1890, Nos. 185–195; Sur, British Relations, 79. 132 Chattopadhyay and Gangopadhyay (eds.), Ravindranatha o Tripura, 4–5; Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 4, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1988, 207–8. 133 RNPB 1899: Basumati, 8 June, 28 September; RNPB 1900: Dacca Prakash, 1 April; RNPB 1901: Bengalee, 21 February. 134 RNPB: Dacca Prakash, 1 October 1899.

135 Note of Lord Curzon, 6 October 1902, and Letter from Under-Secretary to the Government of India, in the Foreign Department, to the Officiating Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 20 December 1902, in Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, March 1903, Progs. 46–57; The Bengalee, 3 July 1904 and 10 July 1904, enclosed with Letter from J. O. Miller, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, to L. W. Dane, Secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign Department, July 1904, in Foreign Department Notes, Government of India, Internal – A., August 1904, Nos. 116–131.

136 Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 4, 207–8. For details of press agitation, and on Mahimchandra’s mission, see also: Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 40 (8–10), 1901–2, ‘Mr J. N. Roy’s Alleged Arrest in Hill Tippera and Expulsion, and His Memorial’. 137 Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 4, 305–6; Rabindranath Tagore, Ravindrarachanavali, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1987, 239.

138 Memorandum of the Raja of Hill Tippera given to J. Woodburn, LieutenantGovernor of Bengal (quotes from 14), accompanying letter of J. Woodburn to C. W. Bolton, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 24 January 1901, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 20 (12-13), 1901, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’. 139 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 20 (1–11), 1901, ‘Representation of Shamarendra Chandra Deb Barman about his claim to the Jubrajship of Hill Tippera’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 20 (12–13), 1901, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 14 (1–3), 1902, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (9–10), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Letter from W. C. Macpherson, Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, 7 December 1903, accompanied by memorial from Shamarendra Chandra Deb Burmon to George Nathaniel, Baron Curzon of Kedleston, The Viceroy and Governor-General of India in Council, 14 September 1903, in Political

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158

The Mortal God Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (19–25), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, March 1903, Progs. 46–57; Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A., August 1904, Nos. 116–31; Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, June 1909, Progs. 35–40.

140 Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, March 1903, Progs. 46– 57. 141 Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 74.

142 Richard Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Preindustrial India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, 80–85. 143 Henry Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas, London: John Murray, 1908 (1861), 202–3, 207, 212–16; quotes from 207. 144 Lyall, Asiatic Studies, 203–4. 145 Ibid., 224.

146 Smita Tewari Jassal, ‘Primogeniture in Awadh: Sociological Implications for Class and Gender’, Economic and Political Weekly 32(22) 1997: 1255–64. 147 Ramusack, Indian Princes, 74; John McLeod, Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India, 1916–1947, Leiden: Brill, 1999, 237–42.

148 Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, 69–70, 173; Shaharyar M. Khan, The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India, London: I. B. Tauris, 2000, 189– 213.

149 Letter from L. Hare, Offg. Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, No. 626 P, 24 February 1903, and Note of H. L. Stephenson, Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 21.2.1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (1-2), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Letter from the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, No. 1287 IB, 16 March 1903, Note of L. Hare, 17.3.1903, Note of H. L. Stephenson, 1.4.1903, and Note of L. Hare, 2.4.1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (3–4), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Letter from C. J. S. Faulder, Commissioner of the Chittagong Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, No. 2 Confidential, 10 April 1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (5–8), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Chatterjee, ‘Genealogy’. 150 Letter of R. K. Deb Barman to the Political Agent, Hill Tippera, 1 April 1903, with accompanying ‘Note on Tippera Succession’ of Uma Kanta Das, Minister, 27 March 1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (5–8), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’.

151 Letter from Babu Narendra Kishore Deb Barman to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 7 May 1903, and Note of H. L. Stephenson, 12.5.1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 159 List, File No. 18 (11–12), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Letter from W. C. Macpherson, Offg. Chief Secretary to Government of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, No. 568 P.–D., 8 June 1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (13–14), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Memorial of Narendra Kishore Deb Barman to Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 7 May 1903, and Memorandum from the Commissioner of Chittagong, 2 June 1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (15), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’

152 Letter from Major H. Daly, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, No. 3449 IB, 23 July 1903, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (17–18), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’.

153 Notes and Orders in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (17-18), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’, 1–3; Memo. By H. W. Scrooge, Political Agent, Hill Tippera, No. 14 Confidential, 6 November 1903, and Note 238-1-75, dated 2 November 1903, from Rai Umakanta Das Bahadur, Minister, Tippera State, to the Political Agent, Tippera, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 18 (19–25), 1903, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’; Foreign Department, Government of India, Political – A, April 1863, Nos. 8–11; Note of T. W. Richardson, District and Sessions Judge, on Special Duty, 14 June 1902, ‘The Tippera Succession Case’, in Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, March 1903, Progs. 46–57; Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A, August 1904, Nos. 116-131. 154 Shrirajamala, vol. 1, 55–57, 278; vol. 2, 9, 39, 67–68, 252–55, 258; vol. 4, 176; Somendrachandra Debbarma (ed.), 1340 Tripurabda Saner Tripura Rajyer Census Vivarani, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1997 (1933), 88. Contrastively, Rabindranath’s Visarjana projected Gunavati as an interfering queen. 155 Ampthill’s Sanad Granted to Radha Kishore Manikya, 1904, in Foreign Department, Government of India, Internal – A., August 1904, Nos. 116–31; Appendix of Report on the Administration of the Tripura State (hereafter, Tripura Administration Report) for the Year 1312 TE (1902–1903 AD), in Administration Report of Tripura State since 1902, ed. Mahadev Chakravarti, vol. 1, Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1994, 103. 156 Letter from Shamarendra Chandra Deb Barman, Bara Thakur of the State of Hill Tippera, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 19 January 1902, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 14 (1–3), 1902, ‘Hill Tippera Succession’. 157 Chattopadhyay and Gangopadhyay (eds.), Ravindranatha o Tripura, 305–8, 316.

158 Ibid., 307–8. Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) was a social reformer and Moderate Indian nationalist from Bombay Presidency. 159 Ibid., 310–18. 160 Ibid., 319–20. 161 Ibid., 329–42.

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162 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Deshiya Rajya’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 106–12 (quote from 112); Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 5, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1990, 248. 163 Chattopadhyay and Gangopadhyay (eds.), Ravindranatha o Tripura, 270–71.

164 Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 5, 247–51, 293, 329.

165 Ibid., 35–36; Thakur (Debbarma), ‘Tripur Darbare Ravindranatha’, 77–79. Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) contributed significantly to physics, botany and Bengali literature.

166 Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani: vol. 7, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1997, 447–48; vol. 9, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2010, 289–90; Tripura Administration Report for 1331 TE (1921–22), in Administration Report of Tripura State since 1902, vol. 2, Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1994, 897; Dinesh Chandra Sen, Brhat Vanga, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1934. Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay (1838–1903) was a nationalist litterateur from Bengal. Dinesh Chandra Sen (1866–1939) was a nationalist scholar of Bengali language and literature.

167 Memorandum from W. Muir, Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, 26 September 1866, in Judicial Department, Government of Bengal, October 1866, Prog. No. 95; Tripura Administration Report for 1330 TE (1920– 21), in Tripura since 1902, vol. 2, 808; Tripura State Gazette Samkalan, 1903–1949, edited by Suprasanna Banerji, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1971, 102. 168 Tripura Gazette, 280.

169 Ibid., 54–55; Rajgi Tripurar Sarkari Bangla, edited by Dwijendrachandra Datta and Suprasanna Banerji, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1976, 125.

170 Tripura Administration Report for 1350 TE – 1352 TE (1940–1943), in Administration Report of Tripura State since 1902, vol. 4, Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1994, 2086; Tripura Gazette, 304–5. The newspaper Nayak had first recommended in 1911 that Rabindranath be given the title to mark George V’s visit to India. RNPB: Nayak 3 November 1911. 171 On the use of the term ‘development’ in Cooch Behar by British colonial and Indian princely elites, see, for example, Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 13, 288, 299, 324, 428. I am indebted to Agamben, Kingdom, for the links between this understanding of ‘economy’ and of modern regimes of government. 172 On grhalakshmi, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 8, edited by David Arnold and David Hardiman, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 50–88.

173 See Chapter 3.

174 Biswamoy Pati, ‘Interrogating Stereotypes: Exploring the Princely States in Colonial Orissa’, South Asia Research 25(2) 2005: 165–82, and ‘The Order of Legitimacy: Princely Orissa, 1850–1947’, in India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, edited by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, New York: Routledge, 2007, 85–98. 175 For the Congress’ shifting attitudes, see Ramusack, Indian Princes. For Gandhi’s, see, for example: CWMG vol. 10, Delhi: Government of India, 1963, 53; CWMG vol. 19, Delhi: Government of India, 1994, 477–78; CWMG vol. 20, 488; CWMG

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‘State is the Household Vastly Enlarged’ 161 vol. 26, Delhi: Government of India, 1996, 115, 247–48, 429–30; CWMG vol. 40, Delhi: Government of India, 1994, 298–301; CWMG vol. 89, Delhi: Government of India, 1994, 386–87.

176 Apart from works cited elsewhere, see: Hira Singh, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power, Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998; Y. Vaikuntham (ed.), People’s Movements in the Princely States, Delhi: Manohar, 2004. 177 Nehru, Autobiography, 530–31.

178 Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997; Dick Kooiman, Communalism and Indian Princely States: Travancore, Baroda and Hyderabad in the 1930s, Delhi: Manohar, 2002; Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004; Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2004; Ian Copland, State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c. 1900– 1950, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Manu Bhagavan, ‘Princely States and the Hindu Imaginary: Exploring the Cartography of Hindu Nationalism in Colonial India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 67(3) 2008: 881–915. 179 The independence movements in Tripura, Cooch Behar, Manipur, and Jammu and Kashmir are directed against the Indian state; that in Balochistan (which was formed in a large measure from pre-existing princely states in the area) against Pakistan.

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3 ‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ Debating National Unity

3.1 Introduction This chapter argues that many Indian intellectuals and politicians imagined national sovereignty through concepts and ceremonies relating to singular rulership. Monarchy – the conceptual abstraction of ‘rule of one’ – became a privileged way of thinking about the unity of the nation as hinged on the nation’s symbolic apex, a singular sovereign figure. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, such discussions were especially popular among Western-educated Indians in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies. Mythical and historical rulers were celebrated in public meetings, popular plays, novels, stories, songs, political essays and invented rituals. The royally-led unification of Germany and Italy in the 1860s and early 1870s and the ascendancy of Japan after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 heightened the attraction of the national monarch among Indians. The British monarchy was a model which was both rejected and dialectically appropriated by Indians. Indian nationalist elites voiced their desires for hegemonically governing the broader populace by invoking these sovereign figures: the imagined monarch encoded the self-image of the male nationalist politician as a guardian of the masses. Ronald Inden, who has written on Anglophone Indian nationalist historians, rightly suggests that the latter ‘transformed the divinity of the king into a sacred national unity’.1 When female rulers were invoked, the transgressive aspects of female sovereignty were sought to be domesticated by male intellectuals and publics (though not always successfully). Simultaneously, the monarch was projected as a saviour of the masses who fought against British and Indian elites. This fantasy of a protector-saviour-ruler emerged as part of critiques of colonial economic exploitation and bureaucratic administration and of the limitations of Indian elite politics. At the level of political metaphysics, it encoded a desire for the non-abstract, non-mediated, concrete, full presence of a certain form of embodied, allegedly visible, sovereignty.

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Ironically India did not develop a real national monarchy. At this chapter’s conceptual centre is an analysis of an attempted coronation which has never been foregrounded in academic scholarship, but which shows the limits of kingly discourses in practical instantiation. Surendranath Banerjea, then the most famous ‘Moderate’ Indian nationalist politician, attempted to have himself ‘anointed and crowned’ in 1906, at the peak of the anti-colonial Swadeshi movement. The ceremony failed to elicit broad-based support and was criticised by other Indian nationalist politicians and the British. Thus, singular rulership was meant to represent the moral-conceptual sovereignty and hegemony of the nation, but when efforts were made to create a real kingship, many Indian nationalists felt outraged. The representation, rather than the empirical fact, of singular rulership mattered to large sections among nationalist middle classes; a practical kingship remained an unachieved project. Why did a real form of Indian national kingship not emerge during colonial rule or in the postcolonial decades? At one level, this had to do with the genuine admiration many Indian nationalists felt for modern-Western liberal-constitutionalist and even socialist thinking. To be against despotism or tyranny became almost a political reflex for these actors, especially since many British imperial ideologues proclaimed that Indians were habituated to monarchic forms of rule and were ill-fitted for democratic politics. These Indian actors read precolonial Indian or Islamic history through constitutionalist and democratic filters. This was true even in the heyday of ‘monarchic’ imagination in the Presidencies. Thus, Tilak, who helped create a cult of Shivaji as a national monarch in Bombay Presidency, simultaneously argued in the 1900s (see Chapter 1) that Indians did not believe in absolute monarchy; it was only misleading colonial propaganda which said so. Moderate liberal politicians in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies invoked the Queen while emphasising the message of civic rights and racial equality they read in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858; but this did not translate into a blind royalism. In the second half of this chapter, I show how some Indians critiqued the idea of divine as well as human monarchy, suggesting that monotheism and monarchy were instruments of power and state/nation building; a critique of them was essential to challenge European forms of racial nationalism, imperialism and state violence. Indians occasionally presented these ideas to foreign audiences, as in Britain, United States and Japan. The imagined monarch in South Asian nationalist discourses was generally a bivalent sovereign figure: he (more rarely, she) represented a transcendental, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.004

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frequently divine and providential, force of benevolence and righteousness, drawing authority from divine sovereignty, while also incarnating the sovereignty supposedly immanent in the nation-people. These ruler prototypes did not just govern people from above (as the British monarch did), but also led, embodied and represented the people. South Asian nationalist elites had to gradually transform, and in some ways democratise, their monarchic discourses to expand their appeal among ever growing sections of the politicised populace. Not surprisingly, therefore, these rulers remain essential in national identity formation in South Asia even today. Mughals, Rajputs, Marathas and other mythical and historical rulers are even now vociferously invoked in public debates across the subcontinent.

South Asian nationalists were elites scarred by subalternity.2 They aspired for rulership and yet were all too aware of the racial power asymmetries which perpetually branded them as inferiors. As such, they also produced sharply poignant critiques of the vertical and violent aspects of modern-Western regimes of statehood and sovereignty. As aspirants for national hegemony, Indian nationalist elites wished to mobilise the masses, even while the British went on expanding the electorate and devolving political powers to Indians, in order to renegotiate the parameters of colonial rule, and deepen and expand the social basis and moral legitimacy of empire. The result of such negotiations was often to dramatically transform Indian discourses on rulership: side by side with warrior kings, constitutional monarchs were increasingly celebrated in the interwar years, often with sophisticated academic rigour. The fulcrum of nationalist politics also shifted, expanding beyond the Presidencies; accordingly, for this phase, I have often highlighted actors who came from beyond Bengal (or Bombay). I would argue that these discussions helped ‘indigenise’ notions of Westminster-style parliamentary governance and constitutional rulership in India. But constitutionalisation was not the only available trajectory; in interwar socialistic, fascistic as well as nationalist-bureaucratic visions, tropes of commanding kingship often resurfaced as a haunting leitmotif.

3.2 India in a global context: European and Japanese influences on Indian nationalist visions of rulership, ca. 1870–1919 Indian discussions on singular rulership were, in part, reactions to British celebrations of royalty. For example, Rabindranath Tagore, writing on the 1877 durbar, urged Indians not to submit to the British monarch, but to

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instead remember the legendary Yudhishthira as the king of India.3 D. L. Roy transferred the epithet of bharatasamrat, the Bengali translation of the British title of Emperor of India, to the mythical and historical rulers Rama and Chandragupta Maurya, projecting them as national monarchs.4 Indian nationalist newspapers in the 1900s frequently (and generally unfavourably) contrasted the British monarch to precolonial Indian rajas.5 The climax of this dialectical appropriation and rejection of British monarchy, while constructing discourses on Indian national rulership, can be heard in a song by Rabindranath, the first stanza of which has been adopted as the national anthem of independent India. This political hymn was first sung on 27 December 1911, at the annual session of the Indian National Congress, held that year in Calcutta.6 Rabindranath invoked God here as the lord of kings (rajeshvara), around whose throne Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Muslims and Christians, indeed East as well as West, came together in love. Every stanza of the song ended with acclamations of victory (jaya he) to this divine monarch, who was described in turns as the leader of the minds of people (janaganamana-adhinayaka), as the providence in charge of the destiny of India (bharatabhagyavidhata), as one who ordained the very unity of the people (janagana-aikyavidhayaka). The song also lauded God as an eternal charioteer and saviour (trata) of the people: Rabindranath drew here on the myth of Krishna as the charioteer of warrior-prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata, while also working through nineteenth-century discourses about the march of providence through human and national history. The divine was, further, described in terms of a mother and a beloved who guided the nation from night to day.7 The English translation of the song, published in The Bengalee on 28 December 1911, described the addressee as ‘King of the heart of nations’, ‘king of our country’s fate’. Rabindranath’s detractors, however, accused him of composing the song as a welcome paean for King-Emperor George V (who was then visiting India), thereby legitimating British rule. Rabindranath himself confessed later that the song was written as an acclamation of victory (jayaghoshana) to the God who was the true ruler of India; he had penned it in anger after a friend had asked him for a victory song (jayagan) acclaiming George V.8 Obviously, an idea of national monotheistic divine monarchy was formed here in response to, and rejection of, the British imperial kingship. For Rabindranath, this national sovereignty was constituted through an exercise of acclamation that linked the people to their divine monarch, at the intersection of popular sovereignty and divine sovereignty.9

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In conceptualising monarchic rule as an agent of national progress and civilization, Germany and Italy were significant role models for many Indian actors. In Dharmatattva (1884–86, 1888), Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay urged Indians to practise rajabhakti (devotion to the raja/ruler), arguing that this had enabled the two European countries to become progressive (unnatishil). People could offer rajabhakti to rulers, or, where the countries concerned were democracies (sadharanatantra, ‘rule by the commoner’), to institutions like the Congress in the United States or the Parliament in Britain. Bankimchandra emphasised the offering of rajabhakti to state officials (rajpurusha) as well, since they were representatives (pratinidhi) of the raja. However, if the ruler or the officials became tyrannical and harmed the people, the latter could force the government to reform itself.10 The national monarchies of Germany and Italy offered political-theological templates too. In a short 1875 essay, Bankimchandra compared the mythic divine warrior-prince Krishna, widely considered to be an avatara (incarnation) of the Hindu god Vishnu, to Bismarck and Cavour. In the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, Krishna had helped Yudhishthira to become the ruler of a powerful kingdom. To understand the comparison of Krishna with Bismarck and Cavour, we need to remember the role of monarchies in unifying Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s. Bankimchandra underlined that through Krishna’s mediation, India had become a united kingdom in the past, capable of protecting (raksha) the people and facilitating national progress (unnati); this political acumen earned Krishna the status of a divine incarnation (ishvaravatara).11 Bankimchandra’s long essay Krishnacharitra (1886, 1892) offered further details about Krishna’s supposed nationalist politics and the way in which this enabled India to be unified into a dharmarajya (righteous kingdom/polity).12 A comparable admiration for Germany’s monarchically-directed unification may be detected in R. C. Dutt. The latter had a deep fascination for Germany’s intellectual, economic, military and political achievements. He felt that surrounded by enemies like France and Russia, ‘Germany must needs be strong, feebleness or disintegration would be national death’. Hence, his admiration for the manner in which Prussia under Bismarck had ‘welded together the scattered German speaking races into one united nation’.13 He was especially impressed by the bond of acclamation which apparently connected ordinary Germans to Kaiser William I, whom he saw in Berlin in 1886: The Emperor looked at the people benignantly for a moment, bowed to

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them three or four times and retired. The loyal people waved their hats and cheered the Emperor vociferously and repeatedly. And I too, though a stranger in this land, raised my hat to the most powerful of the sovereigns of the earth and to one of the best of men.14

There were various reasons underlying Indian nationalist admiration for the German monarchy. In reminiscences about a European voyage which commenced in 1899, Vivekananda praised the royal sceptre (rajadanda) of Germany for spreading compulsory education among German men and women. He also admired the German Emperor’s military prowess and the country’s economic strength.15 Germany and Italy, as nations, were described by him as Kshatriya in nature;16 regality was apparently distributed to the broader body politic here. For Mahadev Govind Ranade, it was the federal structure of German monarchism that was attractive. He compared the historical Maratha polity to Germany in terms of a structure of ‘Confederacy’ and ‘Federal Government’; the ‘ascendancy of the Peshwas was like the ascendancy of the Prussian Monarchy in the German Empire’. Further, Prussia’s role in unifying Germans seemingly resembled the role of Marathas in creating ‘a preparatory discipline to cement the union of the Indian races’, helping in ‘the formation of a true Indian Nationality’. This reading of Maratha history helped Ranade imagine ‘a Federated India, distributed according to nationalities, and subjected to a common bond of connection with the Imperial Power of the Queen-Empress of India’.17 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, another Bombay Presidency politician, felt that the German Emperor had helped develop the nation’s economic strength through protectionist policies. Tilak underlined (in 1906) the similar need to protect Indian industries through taxes on imports. He criticised the British as a ‘despotic Government’ for failing in this, thereby provoking Indians to launch their own Swadeshi movement of economic and political nationalism.18 In 1917, in the course of the Home Rule movement, Tilak compared the contemporary German and Italian monarchies to precolonial Indian rulerships, to criticise the British idea that ‘Indians were not capable of governing themselves’.19 The Punjabi politician Lala Lajpat Rai offered a more measured appreciation. He thought that Indians could learn from Europeans in cultivating patriotic education. Germany, whose education system aimed at ‘strengthening the tie between the nation and the throne’ and ‘promulgated loyalty to the emperor’, offered an exemplar, though Lajpat Rai thought that it excessively championed

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the monarchic state at the cost of the nation. He advocated a more democratic model for India.20

Admiration for the German monarchy could sometimes be found in surprisingly provincial and rural circles, outside the confines of metropolitan cities. For example, during the First World War, Oraon ‘tribal’ rebels in eastern India hoped that the Kaiser would free them from British colonial rule: they recognised German military strength, while also reposing faith in the ‘German Baba’s’ messianic prowess. This was a localised standpoint that did not intersect with the transnational Indian elite-nationalist attempts to take German military and political help to overthrow British authority in India.21 Comparable feelings animated at least one Muslim boy in rural Bengal. Abul Mansur Ahmed recalled how, in his student days, he sided with the German Emperor against the British during the war, because of a general anti-colonial sensibility he shared with fellow Hindu students and teachers, and also since he thought that the Kaiser was probably a Muslim (since the title Kaiser could be found in Firdausi’s Shahnama), as well as because the Emperor was allied to the Ottoman Caliph.22 In the 1900s, Japan emerged as a new source of inspiration for many Indian nationalists who critiqued the limited conciliar politics hitherto pursued by Indian elites, and who desired a powerful national leadership which would develop the country’s political freedom, economy and educational sector. The Japanese monarch became an exemplar of how nationalism could seemingly be fostered by visualising the nation’s sovereignty as incarnate in the ruler: an icon who connected state to people and represented the immanent will of the people-nation rather than a distant and superordinate authority, as the British monarch was in colonial India. Patriotism was cast as devotional love (bhakti) towards this sovereign. One of the earliest cases can be seen in Ramakanta Ray, a Bengali resident in Japan, who eulogised Japanese national monarchy in an article published in the journal Pravasi in 1901. He suggested that Japan had become a nation (desha) by uniting under its ruler whom the Japanese considered as a god (devata), and to whom they were devoted (rajabhakta). The Japanese could thus remain politically independent and achieve economicindustrial growth and progress (unnati), whereas India suffered from famines and dependence on foreign goods. The author criticised the Western idea that the Japanese were ‘uncivilized’ (asabhya), and noted that Europeans themselves had committed bestial brutalities in China and elsewhere.23 The Japanese

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pan-Asianist Kakuzo Okakura’s arrival in India and extensive interactions with Indian nationalists enhanced Bengali Japanophilia. Okakura himself presented the Japanese monarchy as a pivot of the Japanese nation, as visible, for example, in his celebrated treatise The Ideals of the East which bore a foreword by his friend Sister Nivedita.24 Rabindranath (another of Okakura’s friends), in his famous ‘Svadeshi Samaj’ (1904) essay, which was read out at public meetings in Calcutta, made the Japanese achievement of nationalism through devotion to the monarch the ideal for his theory of the samajpati who would be the icon (pratimasvarupa) of Indian national society. He felt that Japanese soldiers died in war, not as mechanised tools, but as human beings who gave their lives for the Mikado and, through him, for the nation, as the Kshatriyas of ancient India died for their lords and for their religion. Further: Japan has shown how machinery can be harmonized with the heart, and how the raja can be connected to the nation (svadesha). If we remember this example, we shall be able to harmonize at the same time the lordship (kartrtva) of the master of society (samajpati) and of the rule of society (samajtantra), in order to construct and administer the national society (svadeshi samaj). We shall be able to directly see (pratyaksha) the nation in a human being, and by accepting his rule, we shall be able to truly serve the national society.25

After it had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Japan’s popularity among Indian nationalists increased even further.26 Thus, in his Presidential Address at the Benares session of the Indian National Congress in 1905, Gopal Krishna Gokhale urged that Indian nationalism should connect prince and peasant, with ‘as overmastering a passion as it is in Japan’.27 Gokhale desired for Indian nationalist politics the ‘concentration of effort’ which happened when ‘leaders receive from followers that disciplined obedience which you find in Japan’.28 In a speech at the Imperial Legislative Council in 1912, Gokhale asked the British to emulate the Japanese Emperor’s and government’s focus on spreading education among the common people.29 Nile Green has demonstrated the comparable valence of Japan among Urduand Persian-speaking literati in India and Iran: an exemplar of this genre was the Persian verse epic Mikadonama (Book of the Mikado), printed from Calcutta in 1907.30 In South Africa, Gandhi was similarly drawn to Japan. Citing the Japanese

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statesmen Okuma Shigenobu and Kaneko Kentaro, Gandhi praised the Japanese monarch for promoting virtue and education among the Japanese, and thereby encouraging them to act ethically towards their family members, outsiders, and their country, and to even act with non-cruelty while in combat: ‘These orders of the Japanese Emperor have promoted virtue in the people, the army and the officials and welded all of them into a united nation. The greatness of Japan today owes much to the above orders.’31 Fighting against racial discrimination against Indians in South Africa, Gandhi identified his cause with that of Japanese residents and travellers in Australia, New Zealand and the United States who confronted analogous racism. Gandhi was encouraged by the way in which Japan’s international prestige, however, offered some protection to its diasporic citizens, even as he lamented the failure of Britain to protect its Indian subjects (from traders to indentured labourers) in overseas parts of the empire.32 In Bengal, Bipin Chandra Pal cited Japan to fashion a nationalist political theology. Responding to a controversy caused by the erection of three statues, of Shivaji, his preceptor Ramdas and the goddess Bhavani, for the Shivaji Festival of 1906 in Calcutta, Pal suggested that icons (pratima, murti) were needed as tangible representations of the ‘spirit of the race’, and as a counter to mere political speeches (vaktrta). He argued that the Jews saw such an icon in the ‘Messiah’ when they suffered under Roman rule, while the French articulated this through the idea (and statue) of ‘liberty’. The Japanese worshipped the Mikado as their nation’s manifest icon (prakatamurti) and directly visible form (pratyakshavigraharupa). By surrendering to him, they showed devotion to the ruler (rajabhakti) and to the nation (deshabhakti). Shivaji was similarly made manifest through the statues. Hence, those who objected to iconolatry because of their belief in a formless divinity (nirakara brahman), or because they conflated monotheism with an exclusive faith in their sectarian deity, did not appreciate the universal presence of divinity.33 In effect, Hindu-Indian nationalism claimed to be a territorialised political expression of the universal authority of the divine, just as an icon was a localised visual representation of universal godhood. This political theology thus challenged British imperial hegemony as well as European-Christian monotheism, to articulate the Indian nation as a legitimate embodiment of divine sovereignty. A comparable political iconolatry was advocated by Aurobindo Ghose in his pamphlet Bhawani Mandir (1905), when he suggested that Japan, through ‘Shintoism’, worshipped its ‘national Shakti’ ‘in the image and person of the

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Mikado’, enabling ‘the little island empire to wield the stupendous weapons of western knowledge and science’.34 The counterpart, at the level of civic selfhood, of this monarchically-incarnated nation was the Japanese Samurai, the equivalent (for Aurobindo) of the Indian Kshatriya hero. Both stood in contrast to the Western-educated ‘bourgeois’ Indian ‘who has ideals and likes to talk of justice, liberty, reform, enlightenment and all similar abstractions’, who ‘read of and believed in English economy […] and worshipped the free trade which was starving us to death as a nation’, and were ultimately ‘servants of absolutism’.35 In essays written in 1907, Aurobindo equated the Extremist faction of the Indian National Congress with the supporters of the Mikado in late-nineteenth-century Japan, who desired ‘a central authority’ which was ‘leader and sovereign in Japan’. To these Extremists, the Kshatriya-Samurai was the ideal. In contrast, Aurobindo mapped his Moderate opponents as similar to the supporters of the Shogunate.36 In 1909, in the landscape of the Persian Constitutional Revolution which transformed the Qajar regime, Aurobindo suggested that a ‘patriotic King like the Mikado’, or in their absence, someone like the Regent of Persia, ‘alone can form the centre of national reconstruction’ for ‘Asiatic peoples’.37 Another example of this monarchic veneration is visible in Pulinbehari Das (1877-1949), leader of the militant-revolutionary Dacca Anushilan Samiti. His treatise The Total Surrender of One’s Personal Independence in the Hands of a Leader argued that Japan had succeeded because of the Mikado’s leadership, while disunity had resulted in the failures of Russian nihilism. Das concluded that ‘democratic principle’ and ‘the consent of everyone’ had to be sacrificed to ensure the effectiveness of anti-colonial militant action.38 Contrastively, it was democratic monarchism which attracted Manmathanath Ghosh, who had lived for some time in Japan and later started a Japaneseinfluenced comb and button factory in Bengal as part of the Swadeshi programme for national economic development. He noted in 1915 that with: the spread of national education, the emperor of Japan removed all social distinctions (jatibheda) among the Japanese, and converted the entire nation (jati) into a great nation (mahajati). So all Japanese now enjoyed all the rights of the samurais, and engaged, like them, in augmenting the glory of the empire (samrajya) and of the nation.

The Japanese had become ‘invincible in war, and unconquerable in devotion to their raja and in love for the nation’. He felt that Indians could become

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similarly powerful and establish a national life by removing caste distinctions.39 Manmathanath further argued that though Japan was a rajatantra (a polity ruled by a raja), it was actually a prajatantra (a polity ruled by the people). The people enjoyed all rights and elected their representatives, who worked in harmony with state officials. Their nationalism was enhanced by Shinto belief that the ruler was a representative of God and that Japan was the land of ancestral spirits.40

One can observe a certain leitmotif in early-twentieth-century Bengali discourses on the Japanese monarchy. Japan was praised for embodying and worshipping the nation in an icon, namely, its Emperor; this stood against the Indian elites who were complicit in keeping India servile by adhering (in Aurobindo’s phrase) to ‘abstractions’. The concreteness of monarchic iconicity, for which Japan was the archetypal node of inspiration – its being a prakatamurti and pratyakshavigraharupa (Bipin Chandra Pal), shakti (Aurobindo), pratimasvarupa (Rabindranath) – was posited against the abstractions of European-colonial rule which offered high ideals evacuated of sincere intentions of popular welfare. This political theology, while critiquing colonialism as a rule of abstraction, also (sometimes) castigated monotheism as an unfulfilled theology: the universality of the divine supposedly needed concretisation through the iconicity of the local, of the monarchic-national emanation. Against the rule of a foreign bureaucracy, of free trade capitalism, of disembodied enlightenment ideals, and of servile indigenous elites, stood the nationalist worship of an iconic ruler or leader who supposedly instantiated the ‘true’ will and welfare of the people, putting into practice the benevolence that British colonial elites and their Indian collaborators only promised in the abstract, but never implemented in reality. For people like Rabindranath and Pal, who were affiliated to the Brahmo movement founded by Rammohun – with its insistence on a formless worship of divinity – this new premium on the divine form entailed a major transformation. Andrew Sartori’s argument about ‘immanentist monism’ offers a paradigmatic explanation: he suggests that in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Bengal, through neo-Shakta and neo-Vaishnava theologies, Indian nationalists critiqued colonialism and its ‘abstractions’ in the name of a national community which embodied and concretised the divine.41 I would add that this critique of ‘abstraction’ also resulted in the creation of new visions of national monarchy: against the rule of abstraction (as colonialism was conceptualised by these Bengalis), stood the rule of a monarch who embodied and concretised both the divine and the

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national, who in fact seemingly collapsed the two into the same order of reality, thus founding an explosively valent order of divinised national sovereignty.

Not all Indian nationalists, however, uncritically admired Japan. Nivedita had praised Japan in 1904 for resisting Western domination and for spreading education among its people. But by 1907, she became markedly critical, accusing Japan of behaving worse than beasts, worse than ‘the wolf’, towards the Korean people after forcing the Korean Emperor to abdicate. She felt that the Japanese were comparable in their colonial violence to the Spanish in Mexico and to the Belgians in Congo.42 Rabindranath too made a volte-face. As the First World War revealed to him the horrors of nationalist chauvinism, Rabindranath increasingly condemned Japan for identifying its Emperor with divinity (devata), thereby deifying the nation itself. Though he had earlier seen this deification as an inspiration to think about a future Indian national leadership, now he castigated Japan as a ‘Mongoloid’ ‘civilization’ (sabhyata). Japan, and specifically Shintoism, supposedly lacked the spiritual core possessed by India and Europe, which enabled the latter civilizations to distinguish between ethics and politics, between transcendental divinity and immanent state power, in a way that Shintoism allegedly could not.43 Gandhi too grew increasingly critical across the interwar years: he condemned Japanese aggression on China and refused to support Subhas Chandra Bose’s mission of liberating India through Japanese help during the Second World War. For Gandhi, Japanese imperialism was ultimately comparable to British colonial rule and to Nazism.44

3.3 The logic of nationalist monarchism in Indian discourses, ca. 1858–1919 To justify that the nation was a force of welfare (and thus had the ethical authority to wrest power away from the empire), many Indian actors linked the idea of the nation to transcendental notions of moral order, justice and divinity. But simultaneously the nation also had to justify itself as the immanent representative of the people (a logic which the empire did not normally need to invoke). The idealised representation of the national monarch linked these two orders of necessity; the imagined ruler was both the incarnation of divinity and a representative-leader of the people. Ranade is typical in the nationalist role he attributed to the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji, who: brought the common forces together in the name of a common religion, and he thus represented in himself, not only the power of the age, but the

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soul-stirring idea, the highest need and the highest purpose, that could animate the Marathas in a common cause.45

In practice, such discourses on singular rulership often exposed community and class differences, showing the fragility of unitary conceptions of nationhood. For example, militant Indian nationalist invocations of Shivaji as a ‘Hindu’ hero who had defeated ‘Muslims’, naturally alienated many Indian Muslims.46 In Bombay Presidency, Brahmin and non-Brahmin ideologues fought over whether Shivaji was a Brahmanical Hindu hero-king, or a leader of the lower castes against elite hegemony.47 Scholars have long observed that the colonial state – through its religion-based legal codes, ethnographic surveys, censuses, separate electorates and policies of discriminatory welfare – accentuated sectarian differences, pitting members of various religious communities and castes against each other, while posing as a neutral arbiter between these polarised groups.48 I underline the fantasies of sovereign rulership through which these sectarian-political differences and identities were translated and articulated by Indian actors. A classic instance of such a myth of sovereign national rulership can be located in Nabinchandra Sen’s Raivataka-Kurukshetra-Prabhas trilogy (188797). A re-reading of the epic Mahabharata, the trilogy offered a vision of Indian national unity based on ek dharma, ek jati, ek simhasana: one (moral) law, one nation, one throne. Nabinchandra suggested that the divine prince Krishna united India into a dharmarajya or righteous rulership through a dharmayuddha or righteous war. Indian national unity was based on the ethical unity of dharma, since dharma was the axis of the world, and only a polity founded on it would endure. However, the unity of dharma was itself predicated on national unity centred on a royal throne. As long as India was divided into separate states, the Aryan nation remained divided, and dharma was fragmented: hence the need to establish one dharma, one nation, one rulership, one political ethics – ek dharma, ek jati, ek rajya, ek niti. Nabinchandra further embedded this theology of national unity and sovereign rulership in the transcendental ethics of desireless action (nishkama karma), aimed at the benefit of all beings (sarvabhutahita), and ultimately founded on the unity of God, the one without a second (param brahma ekamevadvitiyam). Krishna supposedly helped India attain this unity in the past by ensuring that Yudhishthira was enthroned as dharmaraj or righteous raja. Nabinchandra thus performed something of a sleight of hand: he founded the bordered and particularistic unity of the nation on a transborder

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‘universalistic’ notion of divine monotheism and benevolence. The nation became hegemonic by incorporating the authority of transcendental divinity and ethics. This hegemonic agenda was further highlighted when Nabinchandra argued that Krishna’s followers migrated overseas and created Judea, while Krishna was reborn as Jesus. Christian monotheism was thus subsumed within a Hindu monotheistic nationalist theology. There was a racial basis to this narrative as well, since Nabinchandra – who was rather proud of his supposed Aryan ancestry – framed the emergence of the Hindu-Indian nation as a story of Aryan triumph against non-Aryans. (Interestingly, the non-Brahmin Nabinchandra framed Brahmins as wily allies of the non-Aryans.)49 To be fair, Nabinchandra did express sympathy with the defeated ‘non-Aryan’ populations of India. However, his narrative was still a triumphalist one, embedded in nineteenth-century European racist ideas about a victorious Aryan people.50 In keeping with the militaristic genealogy of India’s birth, Nabinchandra also used terms of imperial monarchy (samrajya) to conceptualise the emergence of Indian nationhood (jati), rendering somewhat transparent the indebtedness of notions of national sovereignty to prior ideas of colonial-imperial sovereignty.51 A comparable Krishna-oriented nationalist political theology can be found in Bankimchandra as well. In his view, the svadharmapalana, or ideology of maintaining one’s own dharma which Krishna advocated, was the Indian name for ‘patriotism’: it aimed at preserving the independence of one’s country from foreign conquest. Drawing on the views of Herbert Spencer and Henry Longueville Mansel, among others, he sought to establish the historicity (aitihasikata) and humanity (manavikata) of Krishna on a similar plane as Jesus: thereby he fashioned Krishna as a human, rather than mythical, exemplar. Simultaneously, and in reaction to Christian missionary propaganda, Bankimchandra suggested that Krishna offered a superior exemplar for nationalist self-fashioning than Jesus: after all, Krishna was a perfect ruler and politician, whereas Jesus was so otherworldly, that he could not have functioned as a ruler of the Jews or liberated them from Roman imperial rule. In Bankimchandra’s eyes, Krishna’s greatest achievement was to unify India through a national monarchy.52 Krishna helped create an ekeshvara (one lord, monarch), supposedly to bring about the unity (aikya) of India under one (royal) parasol (ekachhatradhina).53 Bankimchandra ultimately used Krishna as a model figuration of the ruler-politician in order to critique contemporaneous Indian politicians who, he felt, discussed social reforms only to gain favours with the British. These politicians, in contrast to

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Krishna, supposedly only cared for positions in the government and in colonial councils and committees; rather than improving or liberating the nation, they solely resorted to an empty verbal politics.54 The Hindu god Vishnu’s other famous avatara, Rama, was also cited by Bankimchandra: the mythical kingdom of Rama was invoked to point out the vacuousness of the local selfgovernment and political liberties allowed by the British in India.55 In making these comparisons, Bankimchandra partly rejected, from a Hindu nationalist standpoint, the premises of modern-Western social and political reforms; however, by demonstrating the limitations of colonial-racial power hierarchies, he also facilitated populist critiques of British and elite Indian power.56 In constructing a Hindu-Indian nationalist political theology, Bankimchandra, like Nabinchandra, placed a form of monotheism at the centre of Hinduism. The impulse for this lay not just in a political consideration (one god, one nation), but also in a drive to appropriate modern-Western ‘scientific’ interpretations of laws of nature, in order to present Hinduism as a rational religion fit for the modern world. Criticising European scholars (including the Indologist Max Müller) for failing to appreciate the inner meaning of Indian religiosity, Bankimchandra suggested that ancient Indians had moved away from belief in multiple divinities to belief in a single God; the latter formed the foundation of the Upanishads and of Bhakti philosophy. Bankimchandra articulated this standpoint in an evolutionist manner, arguing that as human knowledge expanded, people came to understand that behind all natural phenomena there lay fixed natural laws (niyama), characterised by unity and regularity. Hence, the different phenomena of nature were not discrete divinities, but products of a single administering mind: ‘Whatever exists in this universe is moved by one law (niyama); therefore every part of this universe is enacted (pranita) and governed (shasita) by one lord of law (niyamakarta).’ Ancient Indian sages had supposedly realised this rational belief in a unitary divinity, and called it brahman or ishvara. Simultaneously, Hinduism satisfied human feelings by revealing this divinity through forms capable of being worshipped through devotion. Bankimchandra however criticised popular Hinduism with its focus on multitudes of gods. Operating through a racialised sociological gaze, he found such beliefs to be uncomfortably proximate to ideas prevalent among ‘uncivilized’ (asabhya) populations in India (such as Bodos, Dhimals, Kols, Mundas, Oraons, Santals and Khonds), as well as in the Americas, North and Central Asia, Africa and Polynesia.57

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If we bring together the views of Nabinchandra and Bankimchandra, we see that underlying their focus on monotheistic rulership was a shared HinduIndian nationalist emphasis on law. Nabinchandra’s monotheistic vision was embedded in a nationalist idea of unified law and unitary nationhood; in the Indian dharmarajya, there was to be a singular dharma, embedded in a monotheistic divinity. For Bankimchandra, in addition to this political impetus, there was a ‘scientific’ emphasis on the unity of natural laws: Hinduism was a rational and monotheistic religion because it recognised the unity of laws underlying the universe. In Bankimchandra’s view, this nationalist Hinduism was superior to belief in a formless divinity (the brahman of the Upanishads which reformist Brahmos advocated) as well as to the multiplicity of deities in ‘uncivilized’ beliefs. Obviously, modern-Western discoveries about laws of nature, as well as the British pursuit of legal codification (including the formation of a homogenised Anglo-Hindu law), created the ground for these Indian nationalist ideas of monotheistic national rulership. If a monistic state exerted monopoly over legitimate physical force (to invoke Max Weber),58 then, for these actors, monotheistic rulership served as a precondition for the establishment of a centralised monopoly over both natural and human (moralnational) laws and forces. Monotheistic rulership, with its focus on concentration of powers, offered a cosmological backdrop that made concentration of powers in a theologically-legitimated sovereign nation-state seem an almost ‘natural’ historical trajectory. Rabindranath Tagore deployed similar ideas of monotheistic and monarchic rulership to conceptualise national unity. In a poem he wrote in 1904 to commemorate a Shivaji Festival, he described the Maratha king as a dharmaraj (righteous ruler) who bound fragmented India into a united nation with the noose of the rulership of dharma (ek dharmarajyapashe).59 Rabindranath was attracted to Sikhism, including its focus on removal of caste distinctions, since he thought that monotheism supported nation-building:60 ‘According to their faith, the great unity of belief in one God (ekeshvarvader mahan aikya) naturally became the cause of national (jatiya) unity. They were one in religion (dharma), one in action, and one in power.’61 Rabindranath felt that, later, Rammohun Roy tried to forge Indian national unity on the basis of the worship of one God (brahman).62 In the early-nineteenth century, Rammohun had indeed pioneered a monotheistisation of religiosity in India through his Brahmo movement; however tropes of global unity, more than of national unity, attracted Rammohun’s attention. For him,

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monotheism offered a theological basis for modern governance, based on reformist and liberal ideas of law, property, social relations and administration.63 Rammohun occasionally suggested that religious disunity contributed to fragmentation of the nation, leaving countries like India vulnerable to foreign conquest.64 Decades later, in an era of deepening colonial exploitation and racism, Rabindranath reshaped Rammohun into a more ardent nationalist votary of monotheism. This monotheistic political theology was further embedded in a discourse about modernity. Rabindranath felt that to believe in one God was modern (adhunika) and departed from traditional customs; hence, Rammohun was ‘completely modern, as modern as one can be’.65 There was a subtext of patriarchy too: the model of his Brahmo father (and zamindar) Debendranath helped Rabindranath identify God as a supreme father.66 Further, in thinking of this divinity, he drew on Carlyle’s idea of the hero as ‘the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always’.67 Rabindranath’s monotheism, like Keshub’s, was patently influenced by a Victorian-Christian model of the paternalist household and the cult of the modernist hero; additionally, it was embedded in ownership of property, especially of landed estates. Rabindranath translated this vision of monotheistic rulership into a concrete programme of human ‘monarchic’ rulership as well. In his ‘Svadeshi Samaj’ address of 1904, acclaimed at public meetings (including by R. C. Dutt and Bipin Chandra Pal), he described how India could regenerate itself through a svadeshi samaj or national society, under the leadership of a samajpati, an overlord of society. This would overcome the factionalism, fruitless debate, doubt and over-intelligence that allegedly characterised Indian political life. Rabindranath argued that it was difficult to love the nation in the abstract. One could at most intimately love a small village. To love the nation, one needed to visualise it in a person who was the iconic form (pratimasvarupa) of society and bore proof (sapramana) of its unity. By offering loving devotion and service to him, one would serve the country; by relating to him, one would relate to every person in the nation. This was different from a polity run merely by mechanical rules (kaler niyama), as colonial government was. The samajpati would have a council (parshadsabha), but would directly (pratyakshabhave) rule society, assisted by nayakas or chiefs. The system would first be implemented in Bengal, and later in other provinces of India.68 In effect, this poetically depicted a social contract through which the people would unify themselves into a nation by instituting a ruler who would give iconic form to national unity. It expressed

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longing for a supra-mechanical personalised charismatic benevolence which would transcend the exploitative bureaucratic structures of colonialism. Lyall’s Leviathan met its match in Rabindranath’s samajpati. Rabindranath observed: The foreign power which is engulfing society every day, is united, is firm. It has conquered everything from our schools to our everyday markets, and has made directly manifest its monopolistic power in every subtle and overt form. For society to protect itself from this, it has to stand up on a very firm basis. There is only one way to do this: to welcome one person as the overlord (adhipati), to directly see (pratyaksha kara) every person of society in that one, and to accept his complete rule, not as humiliation, but to feel it as part of our freedom.69

The state of colonial war – a rule of conquest that resembled a bellicose Hobbesian state of nature – thus necessitated a national contract and the institution of a national ruler. Invoking the term abhisheka, used to refer to an Indian ruler’s anointing, Rabindranath urged that: [...] in the empty seat of society, with humility and courtesy, let us perform the abhisheka of our samajpati, let us provide a lord to our shelter-less society – in a holy hour, let us illuminate the auspicious lamp in the mother’s house of our nation – let the conch shells be sounded, let the holy fragrance of incense rise – let the entire nation (desha) perceive itself to be fulfilled in every way through the unwavering auspicious gaze (animesha kalyanadrshti) of the god (devata).70

Initially Rabindranath advocated Gooroodass Banerjee as samajpati.71 But after the British announced the Partition of Bengal in 1905, separating Hindumajority western districts from Muslim-majority eastern ones, he proposed that a Hindu and a Muslim should be appointed as dual adhinayakas of a kartrsabha or executive council: Indians should pay them taxes and obey their orders. He cited as his model the parallel governments run by Armenian and Georgian nationalists to resist Russian rule.72 Rabindranath emphasised re-organizing rural society through a Panchayat-like system for ensuring welfare and progress (unnati). Instead of the empire, national society would protect (raksha) the rural masses, for example, by taking care of peasant education, rural health and agrarian development.73 The Partition made nationalist discourses about social autonomy especially urgent in Bengal. In a public meeting in Calcutta in April 1906, Rabindranath proposed Surendranath Banerjea for the position of

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deshanayaka, arguing that British rule had created a war-like situation in India, fostering famines, outbreaks of malaria and plague, scarcity of water and high food prices. To overcome these crises, the nation needed a military general (senapati), someone like a captain of a ship: a strong authority to ensure social welfare. The presence of several individuals as decision-makers hampered unity and constructive activity: this was shown by the failure of earlier types of Indian politics based on ‘petition and protest’ and a ‘debating society’ ethos. Instead, Rabindranath asked that the holy throne (pavitra simhasana), the throne of mastery of national welfare (svadesher mangalasadhaner kartrtvasimhasana), be filled up through the abhisheka of Surendranath.74 Rabindranath also secretly circulated a draft constitution (samvidhan) for the svadeshi samaj. The adhinayaka and his councils (mantrisabha or council of ministers and karmisabha or council of workers) were to be elected every two years, but once the adhinayaka was elected, he possessed almost unlimited powers. The final decision was always to be taken, after discussion, by the adhinayaka alone, whose will was to be obeyed without question. His order was to be considered as the order of the samaj and he could cast out any individual from this national society without stipulating a reason. The samaj would look after social relations, education, health, arts, commerce, justice and literature; it would reject Western clothes, alcohol and other commodities.75

Years later, in 1911, Rabindranath, in the song which has provided the text for the Indian national anthem, transferred the adhinayaka title to God, the janaganamana-adhinayaka, the adhinayaka of the mind of the people. I read the song as, in part, an elegy for the unrealised advent of an actual human adhinayaka.76 In his play Dakghar (Post Office, 1912), Rabindranath offered another image of this deferred advent, as he portrayed the yearning of a dying young boy for a letter from the divine king, the latter cast as a righteous ruler whose authority transcended that of petty human wielders of power.77 Rabindranath revealed a political subtext in a letter he wrote to the British clergyman and missionary C. F. Andrews in 1921, after he had watched Dakghar in a Berlin theatre: Do you think that Post Office has some meaning at this time for my country in this respect, that her freedom must come direct from the King’s Messenger, and not from the British Parliament; and that when her soul awakes nothing will be able to keep her within walls? Has she received her letter yet from the King?78

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Divine sovereignty was here revealed as the source of (future) national sovereignty. The ‘illegitimate’ authority of colonial rulers and their Indian collaborators was to be subsumed, erased, in the epiphanic unfolding of God’s messianic kingdom.

The ruler of nationalist discourse was not a ruler who ruled by divine right (though he might be divinely appointed) or by traditional legitimacy alone, but by his ability to represent (and protect) the people in order to create sovereignty. As Aurobindo Ghose made Shivaji say, differentiating his own rule from that of the imperial Mughals: Loyalty to the sovereign of my choice, that is good; but loyalty to the sovereign of my nation’s choice, that is better. The monarch is divine by the power of God expressed within him, but he has the power because he is the incarnation of the people. God in the nation is the deity of which the monarch must be the servant and the devotee. Vithoba, Virat of the Mahrattas, – Bhavani, incarnate as India, – in that strength I conquered.79

The people were here imagined as possessing a singular will; the cosmic man (Virat, of ancient Indian myth) transformed a multitude of atomised individuals into a unitary body. The national ruler’s ability to represent the people – the logic of ‘incarnation’ is here the logic of unmediated representation – also justified the revolution through which a nation assumed sovereignty, overthrowing an ‘alien’ empire. Assuming Shivaji’s voice, Aurobindo justified Maratha/Indian rebellion against the Mughal Empire: ‘God also appoints the man who rebels and refuses to prolong unjust authority by acquiescence. He is not always on the side of power; sometimes He manifests as the deliverer.’80 Elaborating on the idea of the national monarch as an incarnation of the people, Aurobindo suggested that the Aryan-Indian ideal of the divinity of the king was based on the assumption that ‘he was the incarnate life of the race’. This ideal was obscured in ancient India by ‘contact with Greek and Persian absolutism’, and later through Islamic rule, which, drawing on Europe and Persia, brought a ‘pure absolutist type of monarchy’ into India. However, according to Aurobindo, such an absolutist ethos was never entirely accepted ‘by the Hindu temperament’.81

In imagining a sovereign who could represent the nation, Aurobindo drew upon Roman history as well. He compared the ‘Anglomaniac’ (Moderate) politicians of the Indian National Congress to the Roman senatorial elites in the way that they relied on ‘machinery’, depending solely on ‘institutions’ to solve

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the problems of the ‘body politic’. This middle-class desire for institutional order and ‘political equality’ failed to satisfy the radical hopes of the common people. In Rome, the success of Caesar and the emperors lay in ‘the clear perception attained to by them that only by social equality and the healing action of a firm despotism, could the disorders of Rome be permanently eradicated’.82 Apart from the anti-colonial context (the critique of Moderate Indian politicians as relying excessively on British institutional forms to attain their limited political objectives), Aurobindo’s argument here also shows a clear affinity with nineteenth/early-twentieth-century European discourses on Caesarism, in reposing faith in a powerful national leadership, championing the popular interests against elite dominance. (Max Weber gave these discourses a canonical academic articulation.)83 But Aurobindo’s admiration for a strong executive did not imply blind faith in a Caesarist dictatorship. For example, in 1907, he accused his Moderate opponents (and especially Pherozeshah Mehta) of being ‘autocrats’,84 and argued vehemently, invoking Tilak, that ‘the object of the national movement is not to replace foreign autocrats by the Swadeshi article, but to replace an irresponsible bureaucracy by popular self-government.’85

We find a Bengali version of the idea of the sovereign as incarnation of the popular-national will in Girishchandra Ghosh’s play on Shivaji (1907). Shivaji was described as ‘the life of Maharashtra, the soul of Hindus, the protector (rakshak) of cows and Brahmins, the protector of gods and goddesses, the directly manifest incarnation (sakshat-avatara) of Shiva, the god of gods’, a symbol of the nation’s freedom (svadhinata). This militant Hindu nationalist vision identified the enemy as the one adhering to an alien faith (vidharmi); the Hindu nation rose through the destruction of ‘Muslim’ power.86 Girishchandra offered a more pacific interpretation of nation-making in his play Ashoka (1910): the dharmarajya or righteous kingdom was united here by dharma and non-violence (ahimsa) under the royal parasol (ekchhatra) of the eponymous Buddhist ruler.87 In Indian nationalist discourses, Ashoka generally functioned as a signifier of a transregionally expansive, but pacific, vision of Indian moral and political hegemony. Nivedita, in her introduction to Okakura’s Ideals of the East, thus compared the king’s Buddhist proselytisation campaigns in foreign lands to Vivekananda’s ‘aggressive’ mission to spread Hinduism in Europe and America.88 In 1922, in a large public meeting in Colombo chaired by the President of the Ceylon National Congress, Sarojini Naidu presented Ashoka and his daughter Sanghamitra (traditionally seen as having brought Indian

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Buddhism to Ceylon) as pre-figurations of the nationalist connections that linked the modern Indian and Ceylonese political movements.89 The early postcolonial Indian state, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, would later take to a climax this celebration of Ashoka.90

Some nationalists used ideas of monarchic rulership to preach the importance of obedience, to be rendered by the people of a nation to the nationalist leadership. For example, in 1910, using an image also to be found in Plato’s Republic (Book VI), Nivedita compared a nation to a ship. For her, just as a strong navigator or captain was necessary to steer a ship through dangerous waters, similarly a nation needed a ‘leader and commander’, someone in a ‘sovereign position’. This was because a ‘trained and disciplined crew in the hour of crisis becomes one man, and that man the captain, the leader, the chief’; ‘as long as he is in command, the ability of his subordinates must be expressed in carrying out his will’. In 1909, with the example of (British-dominated) Ireland, this Irish-born thinker warned Indians about how a nation, for ‘want of discipline’ and ‘failures at united action’, remained politically defeated.91 Simultaneously, across various writings of hers, Nivedita repeatedly suggested that the people as a whole could become king-like Kshatriyas and avatara/ messianic beings: for her, this democratisation of kingship provided the ideological basis for popular sovereignty.92 Her vision of nationalism rested on regalising every citizen; hence her call (in a 1911 volume) to Indians: ‘Come forth O Ye crowned kings, come forth! Arise thou, great People, thou nation that art to be!’ She concluded on a more generic note: ‘The old world saw one king, and many million subjects. The new world has made a monarch of each of these.’ The Vedic benediction on the king would now be given to all the people in a nation: ‘That the People be sovereign, that the People prevail, – this is the cry of Nationality.’93 In his play Tarabai (1903), D. L. Roy similarly underlined the importance of obedience, taking the precolonial Rajputs as his example. He suggested that Rajputs had remained politically weak because ‘they lacked a leader (neta). Everyone is important in their own right. One needs someone who would gather their powers and unify it.’94 Ironically, for all his celebration of Indian national unity, Roy was often equally concerned about the preservation of ‘subnational’ regional and communitarian autonomy. At least that is the impression one gets when one notes how Roy sometimes heroised local/subaltern rulers who challenged ‘Indian national’ monarchs: such heroes included the lower-

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caste Shudra ruler Shambuka who resisted the god-king Rama, and the darkskinned ‘tribal’ princess Chhaya, who stood as a counterpole to Chandragupta Maurya.95 These narratives offered incipient critiques of the caste, class and ethnic hierarchies that structured Hindu-Indian nationalism.

Muslim intellectuals in Bengal offered comparable visions of nationalist rulership, often interlacing Islamic idioms with Sanskritic concepts, in order to ground the unity of the nation in monotheistic and monarchic unity. The traction of the concept of dharmarajya in Indo-Islamic intellection is powerfully visible in Kaikobad’s celebrated epic Mahashmashana (1904), which described how Muslims had established a dharmarajya in Asia, Africa and Europe by defeating the Roman Emperor and other human rulers; in the eighteenth century, it was to protect this space of Islamic righteous rulership that Muslims fought dharmayuddha against the Hindu Marathas.96 An Islam-inflected patriotism structured this work, as it did Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s Vishada Sindhu (1885–91), the most famous Bengali Muslim novel of the colonial era. This latter novel connected Islamic and Advaita/Sanskritic concepts of divine unity, to present a picture of a dharmarajya or righteous kingdom whose ruler was the monotheistic God, the one without a partner or a second, variously described by Mir Mosharraf as wahdahu la sharikalahu, ekamevadvitiyam and advitiya. This divine monarch was the raja of rajas, whose earthly representative was Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hasan. By killing Hasan and his brother Husayn, the tyrant Yazid had challenged the very seat and throne of dharma. The novel presented the task of revolting against Yazid as simultaneously a sacred and a political mission: it was a dharmayuddha, righteous war, to be fought for the dharmarajya, which was also the janmabhumi or land of one’s birth. The goal was the preservation of national freedom (svadhinata) as well as of the path of righteousness (dharmapatha). The novel ended with the reestablishment of righteous patriotic rulership, embodied by the coronation of Zayn al-Abidin, Husayn’s son, as ruler of Mecca and Medina.97 The author underlined the importance of kingship to nation-building by suggesting that as a boat needed a captain to steer it through strong waves, so did the people need a leader (adhinayaka) to protect them from political troubles.98 Scholars have long noted how reformist strands in Islam in colonial India emphasised radical monotheism, condemning and marginalising much of the polyarchy of cults of pirs and even deities that could be found in popular Islam in the precolonial period.99 While precolonial Indo-Muslim religious elites

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and rulers (such as Aurangzeb) had also often emphasised monotheism as the basis of theological and political government, I would argue that, in the colonial period, monotheism got new political traction in Indo-Islamic thinking. This was related to a new-found appreciation for centralised state sovereignty among Muslim (as among Hindu) thinkers. In thinking of Islamic political community in terms of a sovereign polity, and even – to an extent – as a nation-type patria, these thinkers related the unity of statehood to the unity of the divine. Hence, emerged, in contradistinction both to British state sovereignty and high-caste Hindu hegemony, the emphasis on the sovereignty of Allah, manifested on earth through the rule of Prophet Muhammad and the Caliphate, as the basis for recasting the Muslim community as a transcontinental nation-like sovereign community.100

In general, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Asian (Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, etc.) literatures were replete with narratives of national kingship.101 Widely regarded as generic historical narratives, I would emphasise that these were, very specifically, portraits of sovereign figures. Some of the earliest were written in English in the 1820s, by a Calcutta-based Eurasian intellectual, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who referenced South Asian and European rulers as icons of national identity. For this champion of liberal politics, kingship could become a paradoxical guardian of liberty: this stance is, for example, visible in an 1827 poem he penned to champion the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire: ‘King Agis was a Spartan king,/ A crown was on his brow;/ But Liberty that chaplet wove: –/ Such king hath Sparta now?’102 In Bengal, Michael Madhusudan Dutt was the next major author in this genre: he initially wrote in English (from the 1840s) and later switched to Bengali. In part, he was influenced by models of rulership articulated by Homer, Virgil and Ovid.103 In Bengali, as in many other Indian languages, this regal-historical genre reached maturity between the 1860s and the 1910s.

It has often been argued by scholars that these writings reflected European literary genres (pre-eminently, the novels and poetry of the Scottish litterateur Walter Scott), the writings of (the also Scottish) James Tod on Rajput history and/or Indological historical works and discoveries by British scholaradministrators, such as (the again Scottish) James Grant Duff’s A History of the Mahrattas (1826), or James Prinsep’s deciphering of Ashoka’s edicts (1830s). Such an impact-response model ignores the time lags: generally decades elapsed

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before Indian litterateurs and publics took up, on a significant scale, European novelists or historical researches, and popularised them in nationalist media. I do not wish to dispute that European (often, Scottish-inflected) narratives of martial kingship, clan heroism, bardic myth and castle/highland landscapes were territorialised into India, and provided Indian nationalist writers new frames for visualising their own Rajput or Maratha historical topographies. However, in this act of re-territorialisation, I would give primacy to the need for sovereign figures which emanated out of the exigencies of South Asian nationalist production itself, and which enabled the traction of Walter Scott, Tod, and their peers within India.

We have fascinating evidence on reading practices surrounding such regal-national works, some of it internal to the texts themselves. In D. L. Roy’s play Mewar Patan (1908), an aged Rajput prince became a nationalist when he developed a preoccupation with stories of the past. Motivated by the history of his kingly ancestors, he decided to fight against the Mughals in a patriotic struggle. I would read this as a subtle and self-reflexive comment on the impact of regal-historical narrations in fostering patriotism.104 In Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s semi-autobiographical novel Dhatridevata (1934), the young Shibnath, scion of a Brahmin zamindar lineage, was inspired by Bankimchandra’s novel Rajasimha (1882). Rajasimha helped him formulate his war strategy as the king of a kishor-rashtra (literally, state of young men). Both Rajasimha and the adolescent kingdom were structured by caste and class hierarchy (and by gendered marginalisation of women). While Rajasimha celebrated anti-Mughal Rajput kingship, Shibnath’s kingdom operated through a vertical relation between Shibnath as prabhu (master) and the (low-caste) shepherd boy Shambhu Bauri as his bhrtya (servant). Shibnath was shown as being magnanimous to his opponent ruler (inspired by his reading of yet another Indian nationalist narrative about encounter between Alexander and the Indian king Porus), but not towards the lower ranks of this kingdom of play.105 One should not underestimate the seriousness of game here: the very foundation of kingdoms could be attributed to play. In Abanindranath Tagore’s Rajkahini (1909), Gayeb became king when his fellow students decided to make him ruler and to be his subjects (praja) in a half-serious, half-juvenile ploy to prevent Gayeb from attacking them. Later he appointed these boys as real officers in his kingdom. This archetypal first king was projected as a national monarch who died fighting foreign invaders.106 In Swarnakumari

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Devi’s Mibarraj (1887), Guha became king when ‘tribal’ Bhil boys accepted him as their leader, and then playfully adorned him with leaf garlands, a grass crown and a bamboo sceptre. The Bhils subsequently accepted him as their ‘real’ king.107 In these cases, the ludic encoded the incorporation of sovereign violence and social (caste/tribe and gender) hierarchy into the constitution of the nation-state, even while the young male reader (or player) was trained, in the mirror of the fantasy sovereign, to be a member of the nationalist master class. Texts and games about rulership outlined the structure of governance in the nation to come.

I would suggest that the ideological model of this monarchic polity also prefigured the revolutionary ‘terrorist’ societies which proliferated across Bengal, and India, from the 1900s, and which aspired for the violent negation of colonial rule. These societies generally had a hierarchical command structure, led by powerful and charismatic leaders. Meanwhile, revolutionary propaganda in Bengal was carried out through dissemination of literary works and staging of plays in which ancient royalty were portrayed as national monarchs who led warriors to liberate the country from foreign rulers. The relation between the structure of nationalist rulership portrayed in these literary works and dramatic performances, and the command hierarchy of anti-colonial militancy in this era, can be gauged from the manner in which the colonial state tried to control and prohibit the literary-dramatic narratives, and especially the plays. In Bengal, the government maintained three lists: List A, on plays prohibited under the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876; List B, on plays forfeited under the Indian Press Act of 1910; and List C, on plays not forfeited or prohibited, but considered objectionable enough to be stopped. These plays constructed alternative courts, with national rulers, subjects, battles, in a realm of fantasy, and rendered popular, and aesthetically plausible, the idea that India could be ruled by Indians themselves.108 Across the late 1900s and 1910s, precolonial Indian rulers like Rana Pratap, Pratapaditya and Shivaji, as well as anti-British rulers like Sirajuddaulah, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and Bahadur Shah Zafar, were ubiquitous in ‘seditious’ pamphlets which were circulated in militant-revolutionary circles and among broader publics in Bengal to inspire the dismantling of British rule. Shukla Sanyal has shown how these pamphlets justified anti-colonial violence, while also expressing new forms of nationalist ethics.109 What I find particularly interesting is the manner in which ‘heroic’ rulers – along with various Hindu

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deities, and especially forms of Vishnu and the Goddess – became role models for anti-colonial militants. The presence of figures like Cromwell, the French Revolutionaries, Mazzini and Garibaldi in these pamphlets amply demonstrates that the Indian militants were not simple-minded monarchists. Rather, by invoking a wide variety of divine, royal and non-royal figures, these Indian nationalists sought to justify violent overthrow of foreign ‘despotic’ rule, as well as articulate the need for a strong national executive. By combining Europeanorigin models of regicide and revolution with South Asian theologies of divine incarnation (avatara), rulership and warfare between good and evil, they ultimately authored hybridised vocabularies of civic republicanism.110 One conceptual problem facing Indian nationalists, when they invoked precolonial Indian rulers as national monarchs, was that these rulers were often cast by European scholars as ‘emperors’ who had nothing to do with the historical evolution of an Indian nation. Certainly, many rulers who had unified large parts of South Asia in past millennia, and were thus attractive exemplars for modern Indian nationalists, articulated their authority through vocabularies of universal lordship rather than of national representation. Nevertheless, many Indian nationalist actors appropriated these older terms to conceptualise modern discourses of nationality; thereby they battled against colonial discourses which sought to deny any deep historical root for modern Indian struggles for nationhood. A significant example is offered by the Sanskrit term sarvabhauma, from which originates most contemporary South Asian words (in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Telugu, etc.) for sovereignty. The word can be found in Indian texts like the Shatapatha Brahmana and Aitareya Brahmana (both, 1st millennium BCE) and the Bhagavata Purana (mid-late 1st millennium CE). Literally meaning ‘relating to or consisting of or ruling over the whole earth’, it became a title for ‘an emperor, universal monarch’.111 It was thus a title of expansive kingship, which, in the precolonial period, had no nation-specific connotation. But in the colonial era, the term would be hijacked to fit ideas of national sovereignty. Radhakumud Mookerji offers a classic example of the way in which prenational categories of rulership were nationalised. He suggested that India had often in the past been territorially unified by Indian rulers who bore titles like adhirat, adhiraja, chakravartin, ekaraja, rajadhiraja, samraj, samrat and sarvabhauma, signifying their authority over all sub-national rulers, and thereby their ‘sovereignty’, ‘suzerainty’ or ‘paramountcy’ over India as a whole. For him,

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this demonstrated India’s capability to achieve national unity, in a properly political mode, in precolonial epochs. He thus adopted terms from Western (including British colonial) vocabularies of authority and displaced them on to precolonial Indian rulers. He described ancient sacrifices like vajapeya and rajasuya through which a ruler supposedly became the ‘sovereign’ of India, ritually enacting in ancient times the doctrine of ‘a paramount sovereign dominating the whole of India’.112 Ramsay Macdonald, then a Member of the British Parliament, noted in a sympathetic introduction how the author showed India ‘as a political unit naturally the subject of one sovereignty’ and as a spiritual-cultural unity; this was part of a process through which ‘India awakes anew to a sense of independence and self-respect’.113 For Mookerji, when ancient Indian rulers claimed universal lordship, they were in fact aiming at sovereignty over all of India, and thus politically contributing to India’s national unity (rather than to the unity of a non-national universal empire): The geography of India has indeed partially influenced her history: her vast expanse had practically no limits in the eyes of the early settlers and colonisers; she was a world unto herself. An infinite stretch of territory produced a psychology, a philosophy that was easily dominated by a sense of the infinite and eternal. The Hindu Risi would recognise no limits to the development of his finite self. The Hindu king would also set no bounds to his political ambition. It was nothing short of universal sovereignty, which was reduced by the actualities of the objective environment into the sovereignty of the whole of India “up to the limits of the ocean.”114

Benoy Kumar Sarkar argued similarly in an essay published in an American journal in 1919. He suggested that, in Europe, thinkers like Dante (in De Monarchia) had desired a ‘universal empire’, ‘world monarchy’, or ‘Weltherrschaft’ to create universal peace. But from Bartolus onwards (in the fourteenth century), Europeans began to locate ‘a miniature empire in every de facto independent power’.115 Ancient Indian thinkers similarly began with the ideal of the ‘world sovereign’, called the sarva-bhauma, chakravarti, samrat or chatooranta, which was like the European dominus omnium or the Chinese hwangti; they ended up creating an idea of Indian nationality ruled by one monarch. The ancient Indian ruler, like Yudhishthira of the Mahabharata, resembled here the messianic veltro of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Sarkar suggested that this encoded an ideal of ‘imperial nationalism’: The ancient theorists were evidently thinking of the Indian continent as

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identical with the entire world. The achievement of a pan-Indian nationality was in their eyes the equivalent of a world federation just as in medieval European theory the unification of western Christendom was tantamount to the constitution of one state for all mankind. This theory of a world nationalism (or, what is the same thing, a United Indianism) exercised a powerful influence on the political speculations of the Hindus. It […] fired the imaginations of the Alexanders, Charlemagnes and Fredericks of India through the ages.116

The rationale for such a doctrine of untrammelled power, of a power that brooked no external interference or internal (sub-national) challenge, was to proclaim a theory of sovereignty: The conception of “external” sovereignty was well established in the Hindu philosophy of the state. The Hindu thinkers not only analyzed sovereignty with regard to the constituent elements in a single state. They realized also that sovereignty is not complete unless it is external as well as internal, that is, unless the state can exercise its internal authority unobstructed by, and independently of, other states.117

For Sarkar, this unchallenged power enabled the ancient Indian state to embody ‘self-rule’ or ‘independence’, epitomised by the Sanskrit terms svaraj or svarajya. Though Sarkar cited precolonial texts like the Atharva Veda (1st millennium BCE),118 the way in which he interpreted svaraj to enunciate a doctrine of national sovereignty was specific to the colonial-modern era: Indian nationalists in the early-mid twentieth century frequently used the term (generally, as swaraj) to speak about Indian political autonomy or even independence. To locate state sovereignty in precolonial India, Benoy Kumar Sarkar resorted to Hobbes as well. He took a cue here from the Italian Orientalist Carlo Formichi’s book Salus Populi (1908), which compared Kamandaka’s work on rulership and statecraft (attributed to the Gupta era) to Machiavelli and Hobbes. Sarkar also found Hobbes’s Leviathan to be similar to the seventeenth/early-eighteenth century Maratha statesman Ramachandra Pant’s treatise Adnapatra in its ‘absolutist’ ethos of promoting state power. The Maratha polity appeared to Sarkar to be a Hindu national state; he detected in the treatise the alleged idea that the Maratha state was a ‘Kingdom of God’, which embodied the Hindu nation.119 Aurobindo Ghose offered another response to the colonial argument that India had in the past witnessed imperial monarchies, but not national rulerships.

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He suggested that Indian titles of rulership like samrat and chakravarti raja, or rituals (with political and military significance) such as the ashvamedha and rajasuya sacrifices, instantiated imperial ideals which gradually paved the way for the political realisation of the country’s national unity. For him, such a trajectory, in which empires helped a nation realise its innate unity, was not peculiar to India: it could be seen in the way in which the Graeco-Byzantine Empire prefigured the modern nation-state of Greece, the German Empire (under the Hohenzollerns) helped in the birth of the German nation-state, or in the way in which imperial formations paved the way for national unity in Saxon England, medieval France and the United States of America.120

There was an anti-colonial ‘rationale’ which impelled Indian nationalists like Radhakumud Mookerji, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Aurobindo Ghose to nationalise imperial sovereign figures (titles of rulership, sacrificial rituals and the like): they wished to argue that India’s political unity in the past was indebted not to the capricious ambitions of imperial conquerors (alone), but to the will of the nation which manifested itself in the territorial aggrandisement of national monarchs. But such an argument also owed something (as Sarkar recognised) to European history: after all, modern theories of state sovereignty, and later of national sovereignty, had emerged in Europe by appropriating for the regional king – or ‘national monarch’ – the claims of omnipotence that emperors with more universalistic aims asserted over larger stretches of space. The logic of sovereignty demanded that a local, for example national, ruler wield over their political space the sort of unchallenged authority that the most aggressively universalistic of monarchs desired over their empires. The figure of the national monarch, and therefore of the nation, claimed for itself, within its bounded space, the untrammelled lordship that the world emperor could claim over his world as a whole, even as a nation was constituted (to take a cue from the ruminations of Mookerji and Sarkar) as a miniature imperial ‘world’, smug in its self-sufficiency of power. National sovereignty thus emerged, in colonial India as much as in early modern Europe, by appropriating imperial conceptions of sovereignty: in this act of mediation, the figure of the nationalised imperial sovereign played a major role. Modern South Asian terms for sovereignty, which are often based on the ancient royal title sarvabhauma, embody this prehistory. Such a trajectory also demonstrates, as Krishan Kumar, among others, has recognised, the interdependence of nationhood and empire as dialogicallylinked conceptions of power.121

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Indian nationalist interpretations of state sovereignty thus heavily drew on, and transformed, older vocabularies of monarchic authority. Even as precolonial monarchs were thus placed at the heart of nationalist identities and concepts of sovereignty in South Asia, similarly, precolonial dynasties were transformed by the early-mid twentieth century into fulcrums of national history. Celebrated regional histories, like those by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay on Bengal122 and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri on southern India,123 as well as multi-volume megahistories of India like the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series,124 were alike structured by dynastic (vamsha) chronology. Histories of specific regions, or of India as whole, were often narrated in terms of the histories of successive ruling dynasties, with some notes appended on cultural and social formations. While this sort of historiography would gradually be subjected to acerbic critique (above all by historians with left-democratic sympathies),125 the royal stamp on nationalist historical consciousness remains resilient across South Asia until today, as evident, for instance, in the centrality of Shivaji in Maratha identity,126 of the Ahom rulers in Assamese politics,127 and in the disputes about the Mughals across the subcontinent.128 There are visual counterparts to this trajectory. Early-twentieth-century nationalist artists, such as Abanindranath Tagore and the Bengal School of painters, had once celebrated gods and kings in art as models of national rulership. Though mainstream modernist art in India gradually veered away from such divine and regal subjects, the latter remain enduringly influential in popular visual spheres, as in nationalist political posters and comic books.129

3.4 Gendering rulership: Imagining the nation as a regal family, ca. 1858–1919 In his late-nineteenth-century treatise Dharmatattva, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay writes: Whoever is superior to us and from whose superiority we benefit, that one is an object of bhakti [loving devotion]. The social necessity for bhakti is that: (1) without bhakti, the inferior never follows the superior; (2) if the inferior does not follow the superior, there remains no unity (aikya) in society, no discipline, and there is no development (unnati). Let us see, who among human beings should be an object of bhakti. (1) That father and mother should be shown bhakti, that they are superior to us, that need not be

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explained. The teacher is superior in knowledge, he gives us knowledge, and therefore he too should be shown bhakti. […] The husband is superior to the wife in all things, therefore he should be shown bhakti. The Hindu religion says that the wife should also be the object of bhakti for her husband, because the Hindu religion tells us that the wife should be regarded as Lakshmi. But the religion of Comte is here somewhat clearer than the Hindu religion, and should be given respect. Where the wife is superior in affection, morality (dharma), or purity, she too should be the object of bhakti for her husband. […] (2) Now understand, the structure of the householder family is also the structure of society. Like the master of the household, like the father and the mother, the raja is the head of the society. Society is protected by his virtue, by his punitive justice (dande), by his care (palane). As the father should be shown bhakti by the child, so should the raja be shown bhakti by the subject. The raja is strong because of the bhakti shown by the subject. Otherwise, what strength does the raja have in his own arm? If the raja is powerless, there can be no society. Therefore give bhakti to the raja as the father of the society.130

For Bankimchandra, the organization of the (patriarchal) family thus provided a clear template for imagining the structure of sovereignty in a state. His was not an isolated case. Across late-nineteenth and early-mid twentieth century India, many nationalist authors used narratives about families – and especially regal, dynastic, families – to think about the unity of the nation. The regal family, comprising ‘heroic’ father/husband rulers and chaste and dutiful wives and children, provided male Indian elites a conceptual vocabulary to think about the paternalist structure of nationalist political leadership. As the imagined king cared for his family and for his children-like subjects, so, presumably, would the nationalist leadership protect and guard the sovereign nation. Narratives about royal dynasties were thus ubiquitous in Indian nationalist literature of this epoch: the dynasty stood as a signifier for the sovereign nation imagined in terms of a sovereign ruling family. This pattern is powerfully exemplified by the appeal of the Padmini legend across different regional literatures of colonial South Asia. The (imagined) Rajput queen, whom her husband and the Rajputs as a ‘nation’ supposedly defended from the sexual aggression of the ‘Muslim’ Sultan of Delhi Alauddin Khalji, became, in Indian nationalist discourses, the archetypal symbol of the Hindu-Indian nation, the family whose virtue and honour needed to be defended from ‘foreign’ invaders by heroic Indian men and by their self-sacrificing female helpmates.131

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In conceiving the nation in terms of male heroic honour and female chastity, high-caste male Indian (including Bengali) nationalists drew on Victorian British-Christian gender norms as well as on precolonial-origin Brahmanical values. The social scope of the latter had expanded in the colonial era, as British rule, through its legal codification and judicial system, privileged Brahmanical patriarchal codes over the (often, less sharply patriarchal) mores prevalent among non-Brahmanical peasant, ‘tribal’, or artisanal communities. Greater premium was now placed, among ever widening circles, on the policing of female sexuality. The legal and social marginalisation of non-Brahmanical customs happened in tandem with British-aided subalternisation of nonBrahmanical communities (for example, through their coerced conversion into demilitarised rent and revenue paying masses). Colonial legislation offered some liberalisation in gender relations, such as through the abolition of suttee and the legalisation of widow remarriage. However, their impact was limited in a climate of colonially-mediated (and Brahmanically-inflected) strengthening of patriarchal traditions, from realms of child marriage and social taboos against widow remarriage, to the increasing substitution of bride-price by dowry among non-Brahmin groups. British denigration of Indian (and especially Bengali) men as effeminate creatures, and their stereotyping of native households (including princely ones) as sites of debauchery, only reinforced elite Indian male desire to imagine the nation as a space of (reformed) patriarchy.132 Narratives about royal dynasties became key domains for thinking about the nation as a sovereign family, for conceptualising politically the apportioning of duties between men and women, and for modelling the authority of the sovereign over the nation in terms of the authority of the father-husband over the household. As the sage Vashishtha told the national monarch Rama in D. L. Roy’s play Sita (1908): ‘The kingdom is the wife of the king; the subject is the king’s child.’133 Government of the family and government of the national realm constituted twin facets of this sovereignty structure.

In this milieu, royal marriages were complex signifiers of nation-construction. In his play Chandragupta (1911), D. L. Roy cast the marriage of the Mauryan ruler Chandragupta with Helen, daughter of the Hellenistic monarch Seleucus, as a union of East and West. Protesting against Seleucus’s objection to the marriage as ‘a shame for Greece’, the figure of Helen challenged colonial assumptions about the threat posed by Indian men to European women, and noted: ‘This marriage has broken down a great wall between two civilizations.

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A bridge has been built over a cascade of hatred. Two continents have become one.’134 Roy was more ambivalent about the Mughal emperor Akbar’s policy of marriage partnerships with Hindu Rajputs.135 But many Indian nationalists warmed to Akbar, as they interpreted his dynastic politics as prefigurative of the way in which the Indian nation could hegemonically incorporate Muslims into its body politic.136 Emblematic was Sarojini Naidu’s assertion in a 1917 meeting in Patna that ‘the Emperor Akbar took his son to Rajputana so that the blood of the conqueror and the blood of the conquered were mixed to create a new generation of Indians in India. That was the marital union between the Mussalmans and the Hindus.’137 In this view, the Mughals were innocent of British type of racial discrimination; their marriage policy epitomised a broader system of ethnic inclusiveness, which could inspire Hindus and Muslims under colonial rule to unite together and demand political ‘rights and responsibilities […] from the British Throne’.138 Today, in significant strands of Indian nationalist imagination, Akbar is praised for forging the Indian nation through his matrimonial partnerships with Hindu dynasties.139 Just as citizenship in India is defined through a rhetoric of shared descent and blood ties, so is national history narrated in terms of the sovereign monarch’s achievement of blood-unity between India’s multiple communities. Narratives about dynastic union thus offer a way to contemplate the unity of the nation itself. In Indian nationalist discourses, queens, as much as kings, were signifiers of nation-construction. There were two main ways in which queens were imagined. The first type included benevolent motherly figures who symbolised the pacific welfare, plenitude and prosperity promised by the nation-state: examples include Jijabai, Rani Ahalyabai Holkar and Rani Bhavani, and drew on tropes about maternal goddesses like Parvati and Lakshmi.140 The second type of queens, drawn in the image of the fierce Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali, represented the warrior sovereignty of the nation, fending off demoniac male invaders who threatened the nation’s integrity: examples include Raziya Sultana, Chand Bibi, and Lakshmibai of Jhansi.141 The Indian nation itself was imagined as a regal goddess, Bharatmata.142 Male Indian authors were typically ambivalent in negotiating such female sovereigns: they were attracted by these heroines, even as they sometimes sought to domesticate narratives of their autonomous prowess.143 Like female nationalist militants in actual politics in the early-mid twentieth century,144 these imagined sovereign icons were sources of admiration as well as anxiety for Indian nationalist male elites.

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The sexualised male royal body was also a key site of imagining national sovereignty: in fact, in Hindu-Indian nationalist discourses, the national monarch was often a very desirable lover. Consequently, in Bengali literature, the emergence of the romantic novel and the historical-national novel are coterminous (with the main male romantic protagonist also being a regal hero). Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s Anguriya Binimaya (1857), depicting a love affair between Shivaji and the Mughal princess Roshanara, was a pioneer in this conflated genre,145 with able successors in the writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, D. L. Roy, and Abanindranath Tagore. In these literary works, asymmetries of sovereign power and asymmetries of romance mirrored each other. Symmetrical love existed between national Hindu-Indian royalty, while the romantic yearning felt by ‘alien’ elements, such as Muslim and ‘tribal’ women and men, remained unsatisfied.146 Social stratification explicitly structured hierarchies of desire. The idea of national sovereignty was articulated in terms of the desire felt for the national sovereign, building public loyalty partly on the foundations of private fidelity. National sovereignty became hegemonic when the sovereign was able to seduce his lover (and the nationalist reader), thereby embedding sovereignty in willing consent rather than (colonial-type) coercion. Sovereignty structured the very aesthetics, the beauty, of the forceful royal body. Swarnakumari Devi thus described the Rajput hero Prithviraj: ‘His body is powerful, his forehead is wide’. ‘Because Kshatriya fire and power have united in him, a miraculous beauty can be seen in his beautiful face.’147 In her novel Mibarraj, Bhil boys gave allegiance to Guha and made him king because of his beauty. A racialised aesthetics differentiated between the dark-skinned ‘tribal’ Bhils and the fair-skinned Rajput hero Guha, emphasising the lordship (prabhutva) in Guha’s features: The newly arrived archer is dressed like a Bhil, but he does not look like a Bhil. His complexion is fair, his body is tall and strong. It seems as if the power of thunder is present in his wide chest and in the powerful muscles of his arms. If an iron ball were to fall on them, it seems that it would break. But that extremely powerful body is not as harsh as that of the Bhil, it is well-proportioned, well-shaped. His face, which can be seen from between his long black hair, looks as that of a boy, a moustache does not yet grace his lips, but in the gaze of his wide eyes is present such a lordship, such a warrior spirit is spread all over his body, that it does not seem that he is a boy. So we shall address him as a young man, but he is only fourteen years old.

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With the bow on his shoulders, with arrows in his hand, a loincloth around him, with free steps, with a bare head, with a bare body, he walked to the Bhils, exposing the valiant beauty of his golden body in the morning light. Then just as the poet is filled with happiness on seeing the beauty of nature, the Bhils experienced such a joy on seeing the young man’s golden, wellshaped, strong body. They felt that the morning had become so bright only because it had received the beauty of this young man.148

This aesthetics of sovereignty trained the subject to be seduced by the superior, to desire the one who subdued him or her. The more the subaltern was dominated, the more they were touched by the enchantment of power (or so the narrative claimed). Power was shown here to be desirable in its muscularity, demanding fealty in return. The climax was reached when the subaltern allegedly ceased to desire any power for their own self, so as to facilitate complete surrender to the sovereign, as the Bhils did to Guha in Mibarraj. To consider another example of such eroticised idealism, in Abanindranath Tagore’s sketch of Bappaditya, the Rajput king was compared with Krishna in his romantic appeal.149 The national ruler, and thus the nation, became an object of loving desire, even as, conversely, the ruler offered a blueprint to the middle class individual for idealising their romantic persona. Ranajit Guha has argued that colonial India witnessed interactions between modern-Western conceptions of coercive order, and precolonial Indian idioms and practices of danda, where danda encapsulated the regal and punitive authority of kings over subjects, of landlords over tenants, of upper castes over lower castes and of men over women.150 Following Guha, if we search for the intellectual genealogies of colonial Bengali reformulations of danda, then Bhudev Mukhopadhyay would be an important source. He argued that danda worked in tandem with dharma or sacralised law in classical India to institute a hierarchy of righteous power which structured as well as circumscribed kingly authority. Further, Europeans and Americans, by neglecting such principles of sacrally-checked rulership, had inevitably succumbed to the excesses of political conflict, revolution, socialism, anarchism, nihilism and mob violence.151 Later, Benoy Kumar Sarkar explicitly redefined danda as modern state sovereignty, in an essay published in 1921 in an American journal of political science: ‘Danda, as interpreted by Manu, is obviously the very principle of omnipotence, comparable to the majestas of Bodin or the summa potestas of Grotius. It is the abstraction of that power whose concrete embodiment is sovereignty in a state.’152

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I would further note that in its masculine aspects, danda embodies, to adopt an expression from Jacques Derrida, a kind of phallic sovereignty.153 Occasionally, this could be quite literal, as in descriptions of a phallic representation of the god Shiva as the divine king of Mewar. The Rajput kingdom of Mewar was projected as the archetypal national monarchy in latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century Hindu-Indian nationalist discourse, with the patriot human ruler praised for deriving his vicarious authority from the royal god. Abanindranath Tagore thus visualised a Mewar ruler: Another was the king, the great king, Samarasimha: as great a warrior as he was pious (dharmika)! When, like a naked ascetic (naga-sannyasi), he made a knot on his head, wore a garland of lotus seeds around his neck, held the sword of (the goddess) Bhavani, and sat on the royal throne, then truly it seemed that the dewan (officer) of the god Ekalinga (literally, the single phallus) had come down from Kailasha (Shiva’s abode) to reign on earth.154

Beyond this literal celebration of the ascetic ruler’s nude virility, danda embodied the very masculinity of nationalist ideals of rulership. Danda, as physical object, was the royal sceptre, and, by extension, any rod of power; its popular counterpart was the lathi, the stick, which carried out similar functions of government, protection and punishment. In Devi Chaudhurani (1884), Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay lamented the manner in which British rule had demilitarised the common people, ending the lathi’s power to resist everyday injustices.155 Bankimchandra’s grief was for the loss of an entire tradition of armed popular prowess which could physically fight off native as well as foreign oppressors. A fascinating coupling of desirable masculinity, danda, divinity and nationalism can be found in Rabindranath Tagore. He was influenced by Vaishnava, Christian and Shakta-Shaiva discourses in fashioning a divine monarch who bestowed suffering and salvation on human beings. The regal, terrifying and sorrow-giving manifestation of divinity helped the individual in triumphing against ‘the fear of people, the fear of the king, and the fear of death’.156 The trope of salvation through pain had a religious and personal aspect, but was also grounded in Rabindranath’s interpretation of history: the belief that revolutionary change could only come through suffering, through divinely-charged great men (mahapurusha) who brought cruelty, conflict, humiliation, danger and sorrow; this was particularly necessary for India which

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had allegedly stagnated under foreign rule.157 Rabindranath penned powerful songs and poems celebrating precolonial Indian rulers and the divine monarch in the last years of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth.158 He accepted European-origin notions of progress (and the Orientalist trope of Asian stagnation) but nationalised this rhetoric; it was the divine national ruler, rather than the British coloniser, who would transform India and place it on the trajectory of progress. The imagined ruler was a sovereign who engineered national progress, while being a deity and a lover.

This sacral ruler was often male, though there were androgynous exceptions, as in the Indian national anthem and in the portrayal of Chitrangada (1892, 1936), a princess who dressed and behaved as a male sovereign to protect her people: ‘In one body, she is father and mother to loving subjects. In love, she is a motherly queen, in valour, a crown prince.’ This regal androgyny attracted warrior-prince Arjuna; he initially rejected her, before falling in love with her who was ‘a woman in affection, a man in valour’.159 Occasionally, the boundaries of good and evil became blurred in this celebration of rulership, as Rabindranath made his protagonists yearn masochistically for pain given by the powerful sovereign. In Prayashchitta (1909), the vagabond-saint Dhananjay Bairagi, on hearing that some villagers had been beaten by the ruler’s men, sang: ‘Again and again, Master, beat me like this, again and again [...]. I have spent my days in laughter and games; let me see how you can make me cry.’ Simultaneously, he asserted a proto-democratic vision of rulership in which the people would share authority with the ruler: ‘We shall sit with you. O king of kings, we shall share in your authority, on half of your throne.’160 The suffering bestowed by the human ruler was transmuted into an ego-abnegating passion for the divine monarch. Rabindranath often made the narrative voice that of a ‘subaltern’ (in particular, female); this allowed him to articulate the anxieties of the colonised as a subalternised and feminised community. The divine-regal male became a saviour from personal and national humiliation. Suffering and pain, however negative in nature, became cathartic when bestowed by God. The divine king appropriated, incorporated and transcended the terror exerted by the empire (symbolically represented by the colonial monarch). The poems in Naivedya (1901) invoked the lord of kings (rajendra) to remove fear of the human king and for achieving freedom within a prison.161 Rabindranath democratised danda, transferring its political-theological aura to each individual citizen. He argued

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that the divine king of kings (rajadhiraj) had transferred his ‘rod of justice’ (nyayer danda) to everyone; hence the people would have to bear the ‘burden of government’, and rule with truth and justice.162 Every individual had the authority to exercise danda and punish even kings who violated the humanity (manushyatva) and dignity (mahasamman) of human beings who gave iconic form (pratima) to the divine.163 For Rabindranath, the human revolutionary and the divine king were thus mirror images. In political terms, Rabindranath asked for his country’s salvation from the divine king who wielded the danda (dandavidhata raja). He asked God to remove the fear of the human king, of the people, and of death from the nation (desha), and to bring to an end ‘the stony burden of the poor and the weak, this pain of relentless oppression, […] this humiliation of the self at every moment, these ropes of slavery within and without’.164 In Kheya (1905–06), there was no overt politics, but Rabindranath often spoke in the voice of the woman and the suffering to a masterly God.165 Some of the poems, written in 1905, coincided with the India tour of the Prince of Wales. The visiting prince from whom Indians expected succour, but who could not help them, may have instigated a poem where Rabindranath, assuming the voice of a young girl enamoured of a king’s son, sacrificed her most precious necklace at his feet, though it was trampled by the royal chariot.166 In other poems, God came as a ‘king of the night of sorrows’ (duhkharater raja), a ‘king of the dark chamber’ (andhar gharer raja),167 and a ‘king of the heart’ (hrdayraj), who brought pain to the lover to open him/her to salvation.168 The sovereign was a royal male while the ruled (often the poet representing the ruled) assumed a subaltern, and occasionally female, persona. Proximate to this divine raja was the human god (naradevata, avatara) who represented the sacral body politic of the nation-people169 or the heroism of individual nationalists. In some novels, nationalist leaders were addressed through avatara-oriented terms or as raja. As Rabindranath turned away from militant nationalism (as visible in India, Europe and Japan), he used such terms with greater irony to critique Indian nationalist leaders.170

In late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Bengal, nationalists often displaced the concept of bhakti (loving devotion, especially as directed to God) to the realm of the civic-national.171 The imagined national ruler served as a mediating figure in this displacement: a substitute divinity who channelised romantic love into the direction of nationalist loyalty. The romantic,

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heterosexual as well as homoerotic, bonds between citizens helped in sealing the social contract through which the national sovereign became hegemonic. Bonds of love were not however entirely secularised in any linear manner. Nationalist actors expressed divergent views on how older forms of affect could be related to newer constructions of nationalism and human romance. For example, Bankimchandra criticised precolonial Bengali devotionalism for depicting Krishna as a sensuous lover,172 and urged that Krishna should rather be shown as a virile warrior and statesman. Rabindranath was more straightforwardly positive towards precolonial forms of romanticised devotion: in him, and through him, the boundaries between the divine, the national and the romantic remained unclear in Bengali imagination well into the twentieth century. Discourses on national sovereignty had to ultimately negotiate these complex, and often contradictory, realms of affect.

3.5 From queenship to suffrage: Transborder horizons and women’s voices, ca. 1880–1919 Is it possible to think of rulership beyond phallic sovereignty? This section focuses on the first phase in the emergence of a modern women’s movement in India, by discussing four women who deliberated on queenship, citing Indian and extra-Indian instances to suggest that women were capable of political action. Some forged transnational connections to bolster their positions. While operating through imperial and/or national borders and frameworks and without completely repudiating masculinist structures of power, these women nevertheless made possible new conceptual – and political – formations where women’s freedom could be envisaged in terms of a global struggle: one in which women from different parts of the world had a significant role to play in battling the – equally global – presence of patriarchy. My first case study pertains to Sunity Devi. We have encountered her in Chapter 2 as she helped seal an alliance between the British state, Indian reformism and an Indian princely state. Her contributions to education, and especially to women’s education, are well-known. She financially patronised and helped run the Sunity College (1881) (later re-named Sunity Academy), a pioneer school for women in Cooch Behar,173 the Maharani School (1908) in Darjeeling, ‘where sixty or seventy children of all castes are taught’, the Victoria College (later, Victoria Institution) in Calcutta, and a ‘technical school for poor

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Hindu ladies in Calcutta’.174 She took part in early women’s organizations, like Sakhi Samiti (1886) and Mahila Shilpashrama (1907), and in the Calcutta branch of the National Indian Association which brought together Indian and European women.175 But she suggested in her autobiography (the first by an Indian woman in English, published in 1921) that she had ‘never been interested in politics, and I think it is better for women not to take part in political work’.176 She also affirmed that her New Dispensation religion taught ‘loyalty to the Throne’, and ‘in the whole of India no family is more loyal to His Gracious Majesty than the Cooch Behar Raj family’.177

Yet, this imperial patriotism remained in tension with subtle – and deliberately personalised – expressions of discontent at colonial rule. Sunity criticised British administrators like Lord Curzon for their allegedly unfair dealings with Cooch Behar. In particular, she felt that British administrators had wrongly removed her sons from her care in order to educate them in Britain and, later, to make them join the Cadet Corps.178 She critiqued colonial policy about princely heirs, suggesting that it was cruel and unwise ‘to part the heirs when they are so young from their mothers’ and to separate them from their native land. Rather than learn Greek or French abroad, they needed to be trained in regional as well as pan-Indian languages (the latter including Sanskrit and Urdu), to enable them to better understand their country. Sunity even suggested that ‘my people do not require a Western education’, an assertion bolstered by the argument that India had ‘produced astronomers, poets, and sages, when most of the European races of today were cave-dwellers’. She advised heirs to be also trained in ‘law, engineering, accountancy, and agriculture, otherwise he cannot improve his State nor help the officials’.179 In tune with this protonationalist educational policy, she wrote extensively on Indian myths and history, focusing especially on Hindu and Muslim women.180 She asserted that ‘Indian women are not so ignorant as Western people think’, and wished for a day when ‘Indian women will stand in their right place and once again India will cry aloud: “I am proud of my daughters.”’181

Sunity’s political ideal was the native state where the ruler took care of the people; in this protective household-state, women would have an advisory role. Her son Rajendra Narayan’s short reign (1911–13) presaged such a future. Sunity felt that he deferred to her, defying Brahmanical authority to make her the priest in his abhisheka or installation, and subsequently stopping a ‘vulgar show’ at a festival in obedience to her.182 To deepen the genealogies

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of female advisory governance, she cited the Mughal empress Nur Jahan as one who advised her husband in ruling India well.183 She suggested that the opinions of Indian princely women should regularly be taken into account by the government. To enable this, the British Queen could ‘include a Maharani among her ladies’, taking ‘a lady from each Presidency in turn, changing her every four months’.184 This reformist hope in a female royal space was bolstered by transregional networks. The Cooch Behar princely family felt a special connection with Queen Victoria, who became the godmother of one of Sunity’s sons. Victoria provided to Sunity the definitive template of queenship, one who ‘was loved by the Indians’, including by Indian women who ‘appreciated the fact that she was a good wife, a good mother, and a good woman all round’.185 To enhance her husband’s and her own status within the empire, Sunity forged connections with several male and female members of European, especially British and German, royalty. Her autobiography reflects pride in these encounters and friendships, particularly with female royals like Queen Victoria, Princess (later Queen) Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and Princess (later Queen) Mary, wife of George V.186 Sunity thus instantiated new transcontinental contours of thinking about the role of women, and especially royal females, in governance, and simultaneously articulated an incipient critique of male colonial rule. She implied that the household-state would have to be nativised and feminised to make it more welfare-oriented.

More stridently nationalist was Nivedita’s envisioning of female rulership. Drawing on contemporary academic studies, as well as on her own readings of myths and local customs, Nivedita argued for an original age of ‘Matriarchate’, when women had enjoyed social and political authority. Indic and Chinese myths about powerful goddesses testified to this era, as did matrilineal systems exemplified by the southern Indian Malabar region. Though women had lost this exalted status in later centuries, some managed to assert themselves as rulers, including dowager queens in China (Nivedita may have had the Empress Cixi especially in mind). The Prussian Queen Louise was admired as an inspiration for German nationalism. Nivedita also eulogised Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. As regards Indian women, Nivedita saw the legendary queens Sita and Savitri as examples of wifely devotion and identified positive qualities in ‘Hindu’ domestic life, partly obfuscating the systematic violence that underpinned it. She heroised Rajput practices of self-immolation of women during war. However, Nivedita also offered more assertive exemplars

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of Indian female selfhood and advocated women’s education and increased participation in political life. She praised the eighteenth-century Maratha queen Rani Ahalyabai Holkar and Rani Jahnava of Tripura for their statesman qualities, and the sixteenth-century Indo-Muslim ruler Chand Bibi and the nineteenth-century Rani of Jhansi for their warrior prowess. She noted the political role of the female rulers of Bhopal, and argued that women zamindars in Bengal, including Rani Rashmani in the nineteenth century, had ably protected their people and estates.187 Noting that Rashmani, the ‘Koiburto [kaivarta] Rani’ came from a ‘low-caste’, and yet had been the patron of Vivekananda’s Brahmin guru Ramakrishna, Nivedita remarked that this ‘subversive’ challenge to ‘conservatism’ logically climaxed in the Vivekananda movement ‘whose lot was cast for all time with the cause of Woman and the People’.188 Nivedita criticised those who alleged that Muslim rule had lowered women’s status in India by introducing ‘cloistering of women’. (Many male Hindu-Indian nationalists subscribed to such ideas.) She suggested that the reduction in gender equality could not be ascribed to any specific religious influence; it occurred due to militarisation of societies, rise in a ‘feudal’ class, and economic changes which marginalised women’s labour.189 In Nivedita’s opinion, different societies across the world practised male dominance over women, and simultaneously offered variegated spaces of women’s rights and freedom. She felt that it was dangerous to forget this diversity; otherwise, the plea of ‘Woman’s Rights’ could become an excuse for propagating Western superiority and thus marginalising extra-European models ‘of rights and of authority’ for women.190 With respect to India, she saw there a ‘whole cycle of feminist institutions’, representing a diverse array ‘of feminine rights and position’.191 The possibility of female rulership also exercised Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932). Born in, and married into, Muslim notable families, she became a pioneer in promoting women’s education in Bengal, establishing, among other institutions, the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School. In 1916, she established ‘the Bengal branch of the Anjuman-i-Khawatin-i-Islam’, whose activities, as Barnita Bagchi notes, included: setting up of vocational training centres for women from financially deprived backgrounds, providing aid for widows in distress, helping young girls from underprivileged backgrounds to settle down by getting them married off and persuading educated women to teach in slums and train their residents for different kinds of income-generating work.192

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Through her literary and social work, she promoted, across Bengal and India, women’s claims for education, employment and political presence. In conceptualising female autonomy, Rokeya drew on egalitarian readings of the Quran and Islamic history, models of women’s emancipation in Egypt and Turkey, as well as on Western reforms. She critiqued Hindu nationalist narratives about an ancient golden age of Indian women and affirmed a transsectarian politics of women’s progress. Bhutia women served as exemplars of how women could work in the open, without any seclusion.193 Rokeya translated into Bengali, and published, the report of an interview held in Bombay between an Indian woman and Begum Tarzi, mother of the former reformist Afghan Queen Soraya (r. 1919–29); this too underlined the importance of women’s education.194 Rokeya imagined a future when there would be female clerks, magistrates, barristers, judges and even a female Viceroy, thus turning ‘every woman of this country into a queen’. She urged passionately: ‘Why should we not earn a living? Do we not have hands, feet, brains? What do we lack?’195 Rokeya sketched a radical feminist utopia in her most celebrated literary work, the story ‘Sultana’s Dream’, published in the Madras-based Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905. Here she imagined a ‘Lady-land’ ruled by a queen, where men, and not women, were kept in seclusion. Women governed the country, enabling it to prosper rapidly thanks to ‘manufactories, laboratories, and observatories’, horticulture and control of weather and solar power. The queen’s ambition was ‘to convert whole country into one grand garden’. Rokeya suggested that female ‘brain’ and ‘scientific researches’ triumphed over male ‘military power’, thereby protecting this utopia even though it cultivated a pacifist policy. Women ‘dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems, which Nature has kept in store for us’.196 Rokeya not only celebrated benevolent queenship, but also advocated a polity where all women would rule. In its non-sectarian nature,197 this dream represented one climax of the ‘global’ orientation of early feminist imagination. Like Nivedita, Sarojini Naidu strategically invoked examples of queenship to champion improvement in women’s education and political rights, even while relating these campaigns to anti-colonial Indian nationalism as well as transnational spheres of political activism. Born in princely Hyderabad, this Bengali politician’s early career encompassed tours across India, Ceylon and Britain. Typical of her rhetoric was a lecture in 1915 at Guntur (in Madras Presidency), where she invoked the mythical Sati and Savitri as models of

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Indian womanhood, while relating the national renewal of India, ‘our sleeping Mother’, to the specific improvements in the lives of Indian women.198 Educated women of Indian myth and history, such as Gargi and Maitreyi, were also nodes of reference for Naidu, as were contemporary European women, who helped ‘in the nation-building of Europe’.199 She transformed Indian (male) nationalist rhetoric about women’s honour, as well as conventional nationalist tropes about glorious regal Indian womanhood (Sita, Savitri, Padmini), into gendered sites of agitation: for example, during a campaign in Allahabad in 1917, to end the colonial system of indentured labour which left lower class Indian women vulnerable to economic and sexual exploitation.200 Naidu also oriented herself to transnational imaginaries of female solidarity, as visible in a speech she gave in 1916 to the Hindu Ladies’ Social and Literary Club in Bombay: ‘Women may form a sisterhood more easily because they are bound to every woman in the world by the common divine quality of motherhood.’ Relishing the presence of Muslim and Christian women in the meeting, Naidu highlighted ‘the unity of sex, the sisterhood of woman’.201 Islam offered to her an expansive space for imagining women’s rights. For example, in a meeting in 1917 in Madras, Naidu praised Islam for giving women ‘not merely her honour due as wife and mother but as citizen responsible and able to administer her own property, to defend her own property, because it was hers and she was not dependent as mere goods and chattels on husband’s and brother’s bounty’.202 She argued similarly during her 1922 tour of Ceylon, while arguing for the centrality of women’s rights in all questions of nationalism and social reform.203

Naidu used mythical and historical examples of Indian (including Indo-Islamic) queenship to counter potential male hostility to women’s empowerment. Thus, in a 1918 meeting in Jullundur, she criticised those Indian men who saw female education as an assertion of ‘boldness, the lack of dependence, and manliness in women’; she provocatively asked as to why Indian men then gave ‘homages’ to the queens Ahalya Bai and Chand Bibi. She also noted the Begum of Bhopal’s efforts for women’s education.204 In the special Bombay session of the Congress that year, she urged Indians to support women’s suffrage, basing herself on arguments of ‘human right’, including ‘a primal right of franchise’, as well as through references to ‘the Goddesses of our land’.205 As Geraldine Forbes notes, in a session attended by five thousand delegates, Naidu’s ‘resolution passed by a 75 percent majority’, strengthening the links between Indian nationalism and women’s struggle for the vote.206

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Forbes writes that from 1918 onwards, there were ‘gatherings all over India – of provincial and district Congress conferences and of women’s organizations – to express support for women’s franchise’. Some British suffragists also offered advice about techniques of agitation.207 Sarojini Naidu was one of those from India who took the campaign to London. In evidence given before a Joint Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in 1919, she referred to successful Indian professional women as well as to female royalty like Sultan Shah Jahan of Bhopal (r. 1868-1901) and Nazli Raffia, wife of the ruler of Janjira. She thus refuted the idea that women, even those ‘in the seclusion of the Purdah’, were incapable of political life.208 Finally, the Secretary of State for India Montagu recommended that ‘provincial legislative councils’ in India be allowed ‘to add women to the list of registered voters’. Though the Government of India Act of 1919 largely ignored the suffrage campaign in India, the next decade saw a graduated expansion of voting rights for a limited number of women in Bombay and Madras (1921), United Provinces (1923), Punjab and Bengal (1926) and Assam, Central Provinces and Bihar and Orissa (1930).209 The bestowal of voting rights to women was a slow and hesitant process; nevertheless, these were significant steps in a long battle by Indian women to win equal political and social status.

3.6 Political liturgies: The sacramental pageantry of nationalist rulership, ca. 1890–1910 In the 1890s and 1900s, across India, and especially in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, nationalist festivals were instituted to commemorate precolonial Indian rulers. I would argue that these festivals established sacramental sites, which invoked past rulers to construct new ritualised practices of national sovereignty and citizenship. Bipin Chandra Pal offered one of the sharpest articulations of their political significance. He suggested that patriotism was not a mere sensibility of love for one’s country; rather, as understood by ancient Greeks, Romans and Jews, it was a real organized cult. The rise of Christianity in Europe had marginalised these cults, but they had become ascendant once more since the French Revolution. For Pal, the Indian festivals of rulership demonstrated the same trajectory of forming nationhood; his ultimate ambition was to integrate these Cults of Patriotism to a broader Cult of Humanity. At the basis of the nationalist ‘cult’ was a specific political theology. We get a glimpse of this from an address he gave for the Shivaji Festival of 1903:

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We meet here tonight to worship the Spirit of our Race – to pay homage to the Genius of the great Hindu Nation, in the sacred Temple of our Fatherland. We meet or ought to meet in this celebration, in a solemn, reverent, worshipful mood, – eager to accept and administer the holy sacraments of nationality and patriotism to ourselves and to the rising generation of our country. The Sivaji celebration is not, therefore, a demonstration, but a rite, a sacrament. We shall seek for its fruits, not in any change that it may possibly work in our outer condition, but above all, in the sanctification of our inner spirit through a new baptism in fire, in the birth of patriotic resolves, and in the consecration of our lives to the sacred service of the Fatherland. This Fatherland, gentlemen, is not however, a mere word, a mere abstraction, a mere idea. It is something very tangible, something very concrete. Its concrete elements are places and persons sanctified by noble historical associations. The vehicles of our national idea are, manifestly, our representative men.210

The idea of the nation was thus made flesh in particular men (in fact, in sovereign figures): the festivals were the sacraments through which these national bodies were consumed by the public, to transform their interior (Pal adapted the substance versus outward appearance divide of Eucharistic philosophy into a nationalistic discourse). Pal also invoked the imagery of the Virat Purusha to represent the cosmic body politic of the nation thus sacramentally created.211 Interestingly, in various writings across the 1900s and 1910s, Pal also referred to Christological theories of incarnation – and especially the doctrine of homoousia which reconciled separation of persons with unity of divine being – and combined this with Vaishnava ideas of avatara, to suggest that the nation could be a localised manifestation of the universal being of the divine. Just as an incarnation did not disrupt the unity of the divine but rather fulfilled it, so did the nation not disrupt, but in fact only fulfilled, the universal being of humanity. Finally, he drew on Mazzini to conceptualise the nation as an ethical-political form which helped human beings to rise above the anarchy and violence instigated by revolutionary forces.212 On this note, he observed: Nationality, as you may remember, has been defined by Mazzini as the “individuality of peoples”. The concept of individuality involves being or personality. Mazzini spoke of Humanity as a Being. And judging from this it seems to me that Mazzini conceived Nationality also as a Being. [...] Literally, as you know, persona means a mask; and personality really means something that is masked. Difference of personalities does not,

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therefore, necessarily imply separate entities but only different appearances. The Christian also holds this belief in regard to the dogma of the Trinity. The three persons of the Holy Trinity are only different in hypostasis or appearance but one in ousia or essence. Owing to the predominantly monistic emphasis of Hindu thought, the Hindu can more easily understand the truth of the Christian position that different personalities do not break up the fundamental unity of Being than even many orthodox and bigoted Christians. The personality of the Mother in his motherland, therefore, does not in any way destroy, in his thought, the fundamental unity of Prakriti, any more than the Personality of Prakriti herself destroys the Divine Unity.213

The Catholic Indian nationalist Brahmabandhab Upadhyay also drew on Christological concepts of incarnation and Hindu – especially Krishna-oriented – ones to emphasise the significance of incarnation (avatara) and symbol (pratika) in visualising the nation as an emanation of the divine.214 Arrested for sedition by the British in 1907 (and dead soon after), Upadhyay seems to have shared with Pal an engagement with the late-nineteenth-century Catholic revival in Europe (and beyond). Pal himself positively compared Catholicism as well as the Oxford movement which helped in the birth of Anglo-Catholicism in Britain to Indian forms of worship due to their focus on visually representing divinity.215 The nation emerged in these discourses as the mystical body of the sacramental national sovereign, the body corporate of an Indianised ChristKing or a Christianised Virat Purusha, Krishna and Prakrti. Nivedita was another major contributor to these discussions which sought to visualise the nation through art and ritual, thereby embodying the country in aestheticised sovereign figures. She frequently compared Hinduism to Christian, especially Catholic and Anglican, worship, admiring these devotional forms for emphasising ‘ritual’, ‘rites’, ‘ceremonies’, ‘procession’ and ‘symbolism’. This emanated from Nivedita’s political conviction that Indians should use ‘rituals’ to foster national feeling, for example by developing a ‘Service of Civic Praise’ which would unite the nationalist space of a city through ‘united acclaims’. A pioneer art critic, she supported large-scale exhibitions of Indian nationalist art and was a champion of the Bengal school of artists, including of Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. Her favoured paintings frequently depicted mythical and historical Indian royalty like Rama, Sita, Rama’s father Dasharatha, Vikramaditya, the Bengal king Lakshmanasena and the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Nivedita urged Indians to emulate European buildings

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like the British Parliament and the Manchester Town Hall, which exhibited extensive historical portraits, as well as British pageants (like the Warwick Pageant of 1906), as part of the process of visually representing the nation and its sovereign embodiments.216

In conceptualising festivals, rituals and art about Indian royalty, nationalists in Bengal took significant inspiration from Bombay Presidency. From the mid-1890s, Bal Gangadhar Tilak had pioneered a wave of celebrations centring on the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji. In 1896, Shivaji’s rulership was commemorated through songs, lectures, processions and artwork at his former citadel, the Raigad Fort. There were similar celebrations of his coronation day in 1897.217 Lacking the physical landscape of Shivaji’s terrain of power, Bengali nationalists emphasised a discourse of ritual and symbol in their Shivaji Festivals, where the ruler came alive in images, as well as through nationalist sports events, often involving displays of martial prowess in handling swords, daggers and sticks, and the marketing of Swadeshi commodities. As the newspaper Sandhya declared about the Shivaji Festival of 1906 in Calcutta: ‘This time there will be no more speechification’.218 To these nationalists, the festival enacted a replacement of the verbal with the ludic, the pacific with the militant, the abstract with the concrete: the nation was thereby symbolised, as well as (to invoke Pal) made flesh in the full presence of its future sovereignty.219 To many Indian nationalists, the royal-national spectacle thus promised delivery from the nineteenth-century politics of word-based petitions and protests: it promised to render the nation more tangible through the muscularity of athletic events, the economy of national manufacture and commerce, and the aesthetics of visual forms. Their aim was to transform the subject into a citizen, one who constituted through his very own body, and through his economic, ritual, theological and political behaviour, the sovereignty of the nation. The festivals commemorated rulers who had achieved kingship through force; thereby, they motivated the subject Indians to resort to violence to achieve their aims. As Tilak argued in 1906, prayers and protests were inadequate ‘unless backed by solid force’. ‘Good wishes between master and servant are impossible. It may be possible between equals.’ Following Shivaji’s example, and methods followed in Ireland, Japan and Russia, the people had to cultivate self-reliance and ‘take such departments as finance in their own hands and the rulers will then be bound to give them to the people’.220 In a 1907 speech at Pune, Tilak asserted that Shivaji ‘did not know what Hobbes or Locke thought about the principles

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of political government much less Rousseau or the Encyclopaedists who were all anxious to replace the old religious theory of kingship by the secular one of contract’. But he could nevertheless rebel by putting his knowledge of ‘Vedanta to practical use’.221 In these speeches justifying the Shivaji Festival, Shivaji functioned as the visual representation, the iconisation, of the new nationalist social contract: one which was backed by the threat of force. From being servants of the colonial master, Indian nationalists wanted to make themselves equals of the British. The image of Shivaji made the nation visible through the figure of a nationalist sovereign, provided a template for elite-nationalist leadership, offered a genealogy for ‘revolution’ by ‘the people’,222 and religious sanction to ‘popular and representative Government’.223 This transformative function enables us to describe the Shivaji Festival as a political sacrament. ‘Shivaji’, as memorialised here, was a signifier of sovereignty.

A major problem with the Shivaji Festival was that it celebrated Shivaji as a liberator of the people from Mughal rule: in Hindu nationalism of the period, this anti-Mughal stance became a cipher for anti-Muslim sensibilities. Muslims in Bengal resented such articulations of muscular Hindu nationalism. In addition, many Bengali Hindus as well as Muslims regarded the Marathas as raiders who, in the eighteenth century, had devastated Bengal.224 In this context, and to celebrate Bengali heroes, the Bengali nationalist leader and pioneer feminist Sarala Devi instituted festivals to honour Pratapaditya – a late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century Bengali chief who had revolted against Mughal rule – and his son Udayaditya. Pratapaditya’s coronation day was commemorated through displays of militant sports with swords and sticks and with wrestling and boxing matches. On a similar militant nationalist note, the Udayaditya Festival involved the ritual worship of a sword.225 In associating armed displays with sacralised militant kingship, Sarala was inspired by the Ramlila and Dussehra festivals of northern India and by Muharram processions. Further, she transformed the Durga Puja festival by celebrating its Ashtami (eighth day), when the goddess is said to have killed the demon-king Mahishasura, as Virashtami, the Ashtami of the warrior. This involved sword-worship, with sacred chants invoking mythical and historical Hindu kings and heroes, as well as games: prizes were distributed by a lady of the Murshidabad Nawab family. The festival of a militant woman (albeit, a divine one) was thus overwritten by a festival for male warriors where the role of women was marginal. In these royal-national festivals, designed to shore up

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Bengali masculinity against British aspersions of effeminacy cast against them, women were primarily urged to be mothers of heroes. Moreover, even Sarala’s organizational role came in for some criticism from Bengali male elites.226 Such muscular-male and Hindu-sectarian biases were also evident in a festival organized in 1905 in Jessore to celebrate Sitaram, another Bengali chief who had fought against the Mughals and was the hero of one of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novels.227

The festivals discussed above focused on ‘Hindu’ rulers who had fought ‘Muslim’ ones; they aimed primarily at Hindu-Indian nationalist mobilisation. Contrastively, proposals to honour the Mughal Emperor Akbar and the eighteenth-century Nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim, had greater trans-sectarian potential. An Akbar Festival was actually held in Bombay in 1907. 228 Admittedly, these were exceptional projects. Nevertheless, despite their communitarian, class and gender limitations, the royal-national festivals, taken in their entirety, had a significant historical role in forging and performing Indian national sovereignty. Standing in contrast to British monarchic rituals, they recreated anti-colonial social contracts: the icons of commemorated rulers made national unity (however exclusionary) and sovereignty visible. They sought to go beyond a word-based politics of petitioning, and to instead exhibit national martial prowess and even the economic vitality of Swadeshi commodities.

3.7 A failed nationalist Caesar? The coronation of Surendranath Banerjea in 1906 While the previous section dealt with festivals celebrating past rulers, this section discusses a dramatic ceremony on 29 August 1906 centring on the most important Moderate politician of Bengal, and one of the greatest nationalist leaders of India, Surendranath Banerjea. His newspaper, The Bengalee, had earlier announced that pundits from across India, including Benares, Marwar and Dravida (southern India), would perform a Shanti ceremony and offer benedictory blessings on him.229 On 30 August, the newspaper carried a report of which the central part was titled ‘Babu Surendranath Anointed and Crowned’. The report noted: Yesterday at 5 pm was witnessed a demonstration unprecedented within living memory when the leading Brahman Pundits of Bengal as well as those

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of other Provinces assembled in their hundreds at the residence of the late Babu Tulsiram Ghose, No. 27, Baloram Ghose’s Street, Kambooliatolla, to pronounce benedictions upon Babu Surendranath Banerjea. […] That the extraordinary importance of the occasion had been properly appreciated by the people was amply proved by the representative character of the vast assembly […]. Hindus of all sects, divisions and sub-divisions sank their differences, and the whole mass of humanity was leavened with the one and the same yeast of love for the country and for Babu Surendranath for whose benefit the demonstration was held. The Mahomedans did not allow their enthusiasm to be beaten by their Hindu brothers; and what is remarkable, some of the most beloved members of the great Islamite community joined the demonstration, to the great satisfaction of themselves and their coworkers. The Swadeshi Associations were all represented […]. The Pandits hailing from up country stood in a file in front and the Pundits of Bengal stood on both sides of Babu Surendranath – a richly-embroidered umbrella was spread over his head – a white chowrie was being kept waving, fanning him in right royal fashion while the Pandits began to chant vedic mantras – a white jasmine garland was put around his neck and a nice floral crown placed on his head in the midst of lusty shouts of Bande-Mataram issuing from innumerable throats. […] Babu Surendranath stood up and received the honours with tearful eyes.230

Surendranath described himself as the ‘professed priest’ in the ‘worship’ of the ‘Mother-country’, and equated ‘love’ for the nation with the Vaishnava ‘doctrine of Love’ which Chaitanya had spread in sixteenth-century Bengal. He urged the renunciation of foreign commodities as a way of solving Bengal’s economic crises and famine. He led the public recital of a Swadeshi vow, and stressed that in the manufacture of foreign goods (like cotton clothes, sugar, salt and saffron), materials were used which were ‘religiously forbidden’ to Hindus and Muslims, including tallow, bone and blood of cow and swine. ‘A religious Edict was next enacted by the Pundits, interdicting the use of foreign cloth and other articles at religious ceremonies, which was signed by all the Pundits present and circulated.’231 Rabindranath Tagore’s speech in April 1906, asking for Surendranath to be the new deshanayaka, was laden with images of sacred kingship, including that of abhisheka or anointing. Perhaps this inspired Surendranath to organize his own acclamation as a national king. Yet, the event had only a bitter aftermath. The Extremist newspaper Bande Mataram, in a piece probably authored by

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Aurobindo Ghose, immediately condemned the ‘abhishek’ ceremony in which Brahmins ‘deified’ Surendranath with ‘regal honours’ as if he were ‘the just and truthful Yudhishthira at the Rajasuya sacrifice’. The piece noted that if Surendranath ‘wishes to be the king of independent Bengal, he should surely conquer his kingdom first, and then enjoy it. Even Caesar refused the crown thrice’, but Surendranath ‘accepted his coronation with effusive tearfulness’.232 Later the newspaper (probably Aurobindo) wrote: This same silly chaplet, it appears, represented the crown of success and might be likened to the laurel crown of the ancient Roman. Visions arise before us of our only leader wrapped majestically in an ancient toga and accepting on the Capitol the laurel crown that shall shield his head from the lightnings. But who is the hostile deity against whom the muttered mantras of the Brahmins were invoked to shield the head of our Surendra Caesar? […] We repeat, the whole affair was silly in the extreme and we hope it will not be repeated.233

The Amrita Bazar Patrika felt that Surendranath had shocked Hindus by posing as a national hero, messiah and avatara, and asked for an end to such hero-worship.234 The East was also critical.235 The Hindoo Patriot identified Surendranath as the author of the 30 September piece in The Bengalee, and advised him to hide and be silent.236 The European press in India seized on this Indian criticism. The Pioneer quoted the anti-coronation remarks of Bande Mataram and Amrita Bazar Patrika.237 It reported what was perhaps a ceremonial reversal of the coronation. ‘European and Eurasian railway employees at Asansol have been indulging in demonstrations’; ‘the effigy of Surendranath was mounted on country bullock-cart and taken in procession through the town where the effigy was burnt in the presence of almost the entire population on the recreation ground in the midst of a display of fireworks.’238

The Statesman was more charitable, and described the event as a Santi Sechan ceremony of benediction. A royal coronation involved other rituals, such as use of a specialised tiger-skin bedecked platform, a golden canopy and the placing of a bejewelled golden crown on the king’s head. A priest had to pour water on the king from a gold-mounted shell, and special kinds of paste, rice and blades of grass would be placed on his forehead, with the injunction: ‘Be thou king of such and such place.’ Such rituals had been markedly absent in Surendranath’s case, the newspaper observed.239 The Bengalee too, by now,

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changed its tone and affirmed that the ceremony was a Santi Sechan and not a coronation. It expressed anguish that Indians should collude with the European press in criticising Surendranath, weakening nationalist unity. It quoted The Statesman’s defence of Surendranath and a letter published in the Bombay newspaper Indu Prakash terming Surendranath ‘Raj Guru’ (royal preceptor).240 Meanwhile the news reached Britain and received wide publicity there. Newspapers in India in turn published reports on the coronation which appeared in British newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Times.241 The Times noted: Much excitement has been caused throughout India by the reports from Calcutta of the coronation of Surendra Nath Banerjee, the leader of the agitation against the partition of Bengal, who has been crowned and anointed in Calcutta with regal honours, a regular coronation ceremony being performed.

It quoted the Bande Mataram (without naming it) to suggest that ‘native papers strongly condemn the proceedings’. It cited a Reuter’s report about a nationalist demonstration under Surendranath’s leadership on 7 August.242 R. C. Dutt (who was then in Britain) however challenged the Reuter telegram’s interpretation of the event. In a letter to The Times, he described how ‘20,000 people assembled on the occasion and chose Mr. Banerjea as their leader; and no wonder, because Mr. Banerjea has virtually taken the lead in the agitation during the last 12 months, and has been prosecuted, convicted, and acquitted on appeal.’243 He soon realised that he had confused the ceremony of 29 August with the meeting of 7 August. He noted the popular approval shown to Surendranath on 7 August, but depicted the ceremony of 29 August as a priestly ‘benediction’ and ‘sanction’ given by Brahmins to another Brahmin’s leadership. Dutt insisted that ‘the statement seriously made in some London papers, that Mr Banerjea has been crowned King (of Bengal or of India perhaps!) is about the most ludicrous misrepresentation that I have seen in any journal for a long time.’244

Dutt’s letters ignited further controversy in the British press. George Birdwood responded that he had initially agreed with Dutt. The ceremony was perhaps an example of that ‘all-pervading, all-sustaining, and all-comforting ritual of Hindu life, which is in everything sacramental and all-worshipful’ and ‘is invariably misunderstood by Europeans unless they happen to be Germans’.

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But the news that an umbrella was placed over Surendranath’s head and a chowrie (chamara, tail of an yak) was waved before him, forced him to conclude that ‘this rite constitutes the absolute sacring of an Indian King, and has been immemorially observed throughout historical Asia (including Egypt) as the consummation of the state, office, and majesty of kingship’. Birdwood noted that when Shivaji was consecrated king, he proclaimed himself to the Maratha nation and India as Chhatrapati, ‘the Lord of the Umbrella’. Surendranath was thus asserting a claim to kingship: for from the orthodox Hindu point of view none but a King can receive the blessing of a Brahman on any political acts, or undertakings; and no orthodox Hindu dare stir up opposition to the policy of his ruler. Only we “true born Britons” contemptuously allow such licence to our subjects.245

Birdwood knew about the popularity of precolonial rulers like Shivaji among Indian nationalists and perhaps saw in Surendranath Banerjea’s coronation an instantiation of the imagined ideal.

Soon, Bishop Welldon, Dean of Manchester, in a meeting at the city’s Town Hall, referred to the unrest in India, and related it to the way in which Surendranath Banerjea had been ‘recently crowned King of Bengal’.246 Other British voices cast sexual slurs on Surendranath since his newspaper carried advertisements of medicines for sexual diseases among the young.247 Brahmin presence in the ceremony was cited to show that Indian nationalism sought to re-establish Brahmin supremacy and strengthen the caste system in India.248 There was some panic that, in the manner of the Revolt of 1857, Hindu-Muslim unity was being forged against the British through the identification of British goods with cow and swine body parts.249 The debate entered Egypt too, with Surendranath praised by Lewa (Al-Liwa), a newspaper run by the Egyptian nationalist Mustafa Kamil Pasha. An Arabic newspaper, El Moayyad, observed: ‘The editor of the Lewa seems to have read somewhere that a man in India has risen against the Government, and that he was crowned by his followers, and so he began to sing the man’s praises.’ Nationalist agitation in Egypt had accentuated in 1906, owing to Lord Cromer’s authoritarian administration and various colonial atrocities; hence Egyptian support for Surendranath alarmed pro-imperial circles in Egypt and Britain.250 The issue ultimately reached the British Parliament, with the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, being asked about the coronation of Surendranath as ‘King or Emperor of Hindustan’.

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Morley was evasive in his reply.251 In the end, however, the coronation created little more than a storm over a teacup, even though its ripples connected India, Britain and Egypt. Indian nationalists might favour a powerful executive (symbolised by an ancient ruler), but they rejected the possibility of an Indian politician becoming a monarch, even if his aim was to defy the imperial state. Mercilessly ridiculed by the colonial lords and by many Indian nationalists, the quixotic figure of ‘Surendra Caesar’ is emblematic of a masterly ritual, hollow and yet fecund with meaning.

3.8 The anti-colonial critique of monotheistic rulership, ca. 1870–1919 Nationalist concepts and rituals of singular rulership had less to do with establishment of ‘real’ forms of monarchy and more to do with imagined representations of national unity and sovereignty. A real (as opposed to symbolic) monarchic project, such as Surendranath’s, was comprehensively rejected. The levels of contradiction go deeper. Many Indian nationalists who advocated a kind of monotheistisation of Indian religiosities simultaneously critiqued European-style monotheism. This ambiguity towards monotheism mirrors on a theological plane the complex attitude that several Indian nationalists bore towards the idea of a monarchic ruler. Monotheism and unitary political executive might help in freeing India from colonial heteronomy and promote national progress, but it was felt that they would also unleash state violence and authoritarianism. A classic example of these inconsistencies is presented by Bankimchandra. We have seen earlier how he advocated a monotheistising Hindu-Indian nationalist political theology. However, he also argued, in Dharmatattva (1884–86, 1888), that European-style ‘patriotism’ was a ‘monstrous sin’ (paishachika papa), as it led to conquest of other societies and extermination of entire populations, as happened with the indigenous inhabitants of America.252 Bankimchandra’s critique of European nationalism as violent and exclusionary is comparable with his understanding of European monotheism as based on bordered hierarchies between ruler and subjects: The God of the Christian is separate from the world. He is indeed the God of the world, but as the king of Germany or Russia is an individual distinct from all the Germans or all the Russians, it is similar with the God of the Christian. Like the earthly king he separates himself and takes care of the

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kingdom, rules the kingdom, punishes the wicked and takes care of the good, and keeps information like the police about what people have done. To love him, one has to develop a special faculty of love, as one needs to love an earthly king. The God of the Hindu is not like that. He is present in all creatures (sarvabhutamaya). He is the interior soul of all creatures. [...] If one loves him, one loves all human beings. If one does not love all human beings, one does not love him, one does not love oneself. That is, if all the world is not a part of love (priti), then love itself does not exist. Until I understand that all the world is me, until I understand that there is no separation between all creatures and me, until then I have acquired no knowledge, I have acquired no morality (dharma), I have not felt any devotion (bhakti), I have not felt any love (priti).253

In his attempt to transcend bordered conceptions of political and theological community, Bankimchandra urged that love of country should fulfil, rather than negate, divine universal love. ‘Love of the country and love of all creatures (deshapriti o sarvalaukika priti), both need to be cultivated (anushilana), and there needs to be a balance of the two.’254 In thinking through such categories, Bankimchandra drew on diverse genealogies of egalitarian thought. Thus, his essay Samya (Equality, 1873–75) defined Jesus and Rousseau as samyavatara (avatara/incarnation of equality): sacral individuals who had boldly and politically preached the equality of all human beings. Jesus was cast as a rebel against the inegalitarian and brutal power structures of the Roman Empire; Rousseau’s social contract theory and the French Revolution were similarly portrayed in a celebratory light. Bankimchandra was also impressed by the Buddha (for protesting against caste stratification), by various nineteenthcentury European socialist and Communist thinkers, and by John Stuart Mill. He simultaneously denounced various forms of racial, gender, class and caste distinctions, and correspondingly advocated radical formats of socio-economic and political equality.255 It is often argued that Bankimchandra turned into a conservative Hindu nationalist in his later years. In fact, the spirit of Samya – including the focus on sacralised discourses about equality – persisted, in recurring tension with more hierarchical strands of imagination. In Dharmatattva, in the essays Krishnacharitra and Shrimadbhagavadgita (1886–89), and in the novels Anandamatha (1880–82) and Devi Chaudhurani (1884), Bankimchandra

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vacillated between emphasising a hierarchical political order with clear distinctions between rulers/ruling groups and subjects, and a yearning for a world where every human being could potentially aspire to be an avatara, a divinised sovereign figure. Anushilana, or the development of physical, intellectual, actionoriented and aesthetic-creative faculties, encoded the potential perfectibility of all human beings. This tension had implications for constructions of nationalism as well. Bankimchandra offered starkly hierarchical imaginings of the Hindu-Indian national polity, but simultaneously and forcefully critiqued the inequalities and violence that nationalist political communities produced.256 Bankimchandra’s contradictory attitude to social equality is graphically unveiled in Devi Chaudhurani. In the novel, he describes Prafulla, a poor woman, joining a gang of outlaws to become their queen (rani); through techniques of physical and moral training, embedded in anushilana, Prafulla instantiated the divine in performing selfless action (nishkama karma).257 Operating in an interstitial period between Mughal and British rule, she functioned as an ascetic ruler and was hailed by people and her peasant soldiers as a royal goddess (devi, devi rani, rajrani): Bankimchandra depicted her as an avatara.258 But she eventually returned to her husband and a life of domestic work within a patriarchal household.259 Bankimchandra thus indicated that every human being could incarnate the divine and become an ideal sovereign (democratising the notion of messianic divinity), but some human beings (male, elite-born) still possessed a greater normalised capacity to rule over others. He was similarly ambivalent in thinking of inter-sectarian relations, advocating Hindu rule (and militancy) against non-Hindus, while also critiquing aspects of Hindu nationalist violence.260 Such inconsistent thinking about the possibilities of democratic rulership and divinity may be found in Vivekananda as well. Vivekananda had visited France and was impressed by the achievements of the French Revolution, as he saw manifested in the Third Republic. Quoting the Gita, he viewed French Revolutionary campaigns against European monarchies in terms of a theology of divine incarnation; he saw the Revolution as an essential step in liberating humanity from tyranny.261 He offered qualified support for socialism, and mapped it in terms of the ascendancy of Shudras to power, unleashing a new era whose ‘advantages will be the distribution of physical comforts’.262 However, as we have seen earlier, he also saw ethical rulership, epitomised by Kshatriya kingship, as essential to India’s national development. One conceptual

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mode through which he reconciled admiration for Kshatriya-regal executive power with appreciation for democracy was by advocating for a democratic redistribution of rajoguna, the biomoral essence of prowess traditionally regarded as an essential constituent of being Kshatriya. The implicit assumption was that if Indians, and especially middle-class men, cultivated this Kshatriya essence and were transformed into masterly beings, then an actual kingship could even be dispensed with. Vivekananda also used rajoguna to advocate cultivation of worldly and scientific progress, so that middle-class (male) Indians could address the material needs of the masses, rather than dissipate their lives serving colonial power structures as lawyers, magistrates, clerks, and the like.263

In parallel, Vivekananda attempted to democratise the idea of divine rulership as well. He argued that Europeans legitimated colonial conquests in the name of a monotheistic belief in the Christian God. For him, this Christian monotheism stemmed from historical intersections of tribalism and imperial monarchism. Ancient tribal peoples, including Judaic and Babylonian communities, had structured their identities around belief in specific tribal deities; in parallel, ancient Persians developed a dualistic conception of cosmic rivalry between divinity and evil, and the related idea of a singular divinity, while evolving an aggressive imperial project centred on a singular human monarch. The Jews in turn drew their idea of the devil from the Persians. Vivekananda argued that ancient Indians initially subscribed to similar beliefs, but abandoned this conception in favour of a theology where divinity was seen as being present in everyone. Such ideas were propagated by Vivekananda before transnational audiences, from India and Sri Lanka to Britain and the United States.264 His assumption was that monotheism was similar to monarchy, in imagining the divine as an enthroned king: ‘Monotheism like absolute monarchy is quick in executing orders, and a great centralisation of force, but it grows no farther, and its worst feature is its cruelty and persecution.’265 This fear of monotheistic violence was partly rooted in Vivekananda’s experiences of Christian legitimation of imperialism: this linkage is poignantly visible, for example, in a lecture he delivered in California in 1900, where he denounced American Protestant missionaries for justifying brutal warfare against Filipinos during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902).266 Vivekananda appealed to his transnational audiences’ love of democracy, even as he sought to turn them against imperialist uses of monotheism. In this context, ancient Indian theology was refashioned to provide a democratic understanding of monistic (rather

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than monotheistic-monarchic) divinity. As he remarked in London in 1896: Just as in the West, we find this prominent fact in the political development of Western races that they cannot bear absolute rule, that they are always trying to prevent any one man from ruling over them, and are gradually advancing to higher and higher democratic ideas, higher and higher ideas of physical liberty, so, in Indian metaphysics, exactly the same phenomenon appears in the development of spiritual life. The multiplicity of gods gave place to one God of the universe, and in the Upanishads there is a rebellion even against that one God. Not only was the idea of many governors of the universe ruling their destinies unbearable, but it was also intolerable that there should be one person ruling this universe. […] In almost all of the Upanishads, we find the climax coming at the last, and that is the dethroning of this God of the universe. […] God is no more a person, no more a human being, however magnified and exaggerated, who rules this universe, but He has become an embodied principle in every being, immanent in the whole universe.267

By offering this narrative of supposed Hindu metaphysical excellence, Vivekananda substituted the monotheistic-monarchic God with a notion (which drew, in fact, on Indic as well as Christian ideas of divine immanence) of the divine as present in all beings, as a sign of their perfectibility and as a promise of metaphysically-grounded democracy. As he lectured at Thousand Island Park, New York, in 1895: ‘The Absolute cannot be worshipped, so we must worship a manifestation, such a one as has our nature. Jesus had our nature; he became the Christ; so can we, and so must we.’268 Later, he noted: In reality the conception of the Trinity was a great advance over the dualistic idea of Jehovah, who was for ever separate from man. The theory of incarnation is the first link in the chain of ideas leading to the recognition of the oneness of God and man. God appearing first in one human form, then re-appearing at different times in other human forms, is at last recognised as being in every human form, or in all men. Monistic is the highest stage, monotheistic is a lower stage.269

Bipin Chandra Pal argued similarly in early twentieth-century Bengal, suggesting that exclusionary and violent faith in one’s own sectarian deity was ‘monolatrous’ (he used the English expression, as well as a Bengali equivalent, ekdevopasak) bigotry, which had historically evolved in tandem with the rise of parochial national (jatiya) identities, rather than being genuine ekeshvarvadi or ‘monotheistic’ faith. Instead, Pal underlined the need to identify divine presence

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in all.270 This eventually led him to an idea of humanity as the sacral body politic of this universal divinity, termed by him (from his neo-Vaishnava theological location) as Narayana/Vishnu: ‘Narayana or Humanity is the Body, the different tribalities, racialities and nationalities are limbs of that body.’271 Pal felt that the Christian idea of Logos also affirmed faith in a collective humanity, but this universalistic sentiment was obscured by the ‘political predominance of the Christian peoples in the modern world’,272 that is, by European imperialism. Pal’s humanity-oriented theology thus offered, from an anti-colonial standpoint, a critique of sectarian divisions and political agonism.

Let me end this section with Rabindranath Tagore. We have seen earlier how Rabindranath saw monotheism as central to nation-building in India. Simultaneously, in part due to his Brahmo sectarian affiliation, he remained critical towards the idea that divinity could be represented through form, i.e., as sakara. However, this was not a mere Brahmo valourisation of formless (nirakara) divinity over a traditional Hindu devotional focus on representing divinity through form (sakara). It also had a political valence, in the sense that Rabindranath critiqued Hindu nationalist ideas, for example as visible in Bankimchandra’s Krishnacharitra, which sought to represent the nation through a divine icon.273 Instead, he suggested that the formless divinity (nirakara brahman) was to be worshipped through service ‘towards family, neighbours, country, and all’, by ‘giving clothes to the poor and food to the hungry’, rather than by revering icons (pratima).274 By the early 1910s, as he grew increasingly critical towards militant nationalism in India and beyond, he began to represent nationalism as iconolatry, as the misguided worship of a false embodied divinity instead of reverence for the true formless one. To give form to the divine, whether in an icon or in a nation, now seemed sectarian and perverse: ‘Iconolatry (murtipuja) is the form of worship in that condition, when human beings differentiate a particular country (desha), particular nation (jati), particular rules and prohibitions, from the wider world.’275 The outbreak of the First World War intensified his conviction that nationalism was a false theology. He lectured in the United States in 1916–17 that ‘the cult of the selfworship of the Nation’ was ‘disastrous’ since ‘the individual worships with all sacrifices a god which is morally much inferior to himself’.276 For him, ‘nationworship’ was ‘fierce self-idolatry’.277 (Rabindranath identified a similar idolatry in unbridled industrial capitalism. Invoking Christian phraseology of ‘brazen images’ during a lecture in Osaka in 1916, he castigated Japan for succumbing

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to ‘the push and the pull of the rotating machine wheels of the present age’.278) In the end, Rabindranath, like many other Indian nationalists, could not feel completely at ease with the idea that the nation could be worshipped as a divine icon and sovereign, even though he (like many others) had once sought to sacralise the nation and to relate the worship of the nation to the adoration of divine rulership.

3.9 Discourses on constitutionalism and executive authority, ca. 1858–1947 The sovereign figure in South Asian nationalist discourses represented the unity of the nation, especially in the form of a powerful executive. Naturally, many Indian thinkers were not content with celebrating such rulership: by excavating Indian or Islamic pasts, they wished to delineate the precise relation between this executive and other legislative and juridical organs of authority, with their sources in various forms of elite and popular power. By doing so, they hoped to create a template for a constitutionalist future for India. As is well-known, an early-nineteenth century pioneer in this regard was Rammohun Roy, who imagined an ancient Indian past where the power of the king was checked and balanced by Brahmanical and popular authority, mediated through consensually shaped laws. The debt to European theories of separation of powers in this frame was subtle, but obvious.279 We have shown in chapter 2 how his late-nineteenth-century Brahmo followers debated amongst themselves the relative merits of a powerful theologically-ordained rulership and democraticrepublican representation; the schisms in the Brahmo movement were rooted in different interpretations about this division of power. The interrelation of theology, historiography and constitutionalism was also apparent in the famed northern Indian reformer Dayanand Saraswati, who (in his Satyarth Prakash, 1875) envisaged a ‘Vedic’ governmental model consisting of a tripartite power structure, balancing authority between the king, three councils and the people.280 This idea of a tripartite body politic, we shall later see, would have a lasting legacy. And finally, we have also discussed in chapter 1 the traction of British models of constitutional monarchy among Moderate politicians in India. Some of them, like Pherozeshah Mehta, emphasised ‘free representative’ institutions at modern local (for example, municipal) levels of governance, as well as in the precolonial Indian past.281

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In this era, Islam provided one of the most fecund sources for creative thinking about democracy. Monotheism became a transparent cipher for political equality; Islamic theologies and histories of contract, much like early modern European-Christian narratives about sacred covenant and social contract, allowed for the imagining of a reciprocal relation linking people, ruler and God; Islamic history provided concrete institutional templates for thinking about constitutionalism. Ameer Ali is representative in the way he argued that Islam, in ‘the name of divine unity […] held forth to all creeds and sects the promise of a democratic equality’,282 challenged Arab ethnic superiority (which he compared to Anglo-Saxon racism),283 and initiated a ‘revolution’. Islam was spread by the ‘great democratic principle that every alien who embraced Islam was placed on the same level as the pure-bred Arab in the enjoyment of political and civil rights’. In a contractarian mode, Ali emphasised the ‘biat’ or ‘oath of allegiance’ taken by every new Caliph, which seemingly rooted political authority in ‘the Ijmaa ul-Ummat, “the consensus of the people”’. When the people thus: unanimously, or almost unanimously, choose a spiritual leader and head of the congregation of Islam, a divine sanction is imparted to his spiritual authority; he becomes the source and channel of legitimate government, and he alone has the right of “ordaining” deputies entitled to rule, decide, or to lead at prayers.

In Ali’s view, a further step, going beyond contractual rulership, was taken under Mamun, the ninth-century Caliph, when: government by the will of one man gave way to constitutionalism. A regular council of state, representing every community owing allegiance to the Caliph, was for the first time established in his reign. The representatives of the people enjoyed perfect freedom in the expression of their opinions.

Later, ‘the Buyides, the Samanides, the Seljukides, and the Ayubides, all had their councils in which the people were more or less represented.’284

Such discourses, in the hands of figures like Syed Ahmed Khan, however privileged an Islamic – or broadly, monotheistic – genealogy for modernity, obscuring other (for example, Hindu or Buddhist) sources of thinking about constitutionalism. Belonging to Islam, or at least to a monotheistic religion (especially Christianity), became a sine qua non for sharing in this theologicallymediated modern.285 Faisal Devji has encapsulated such perspectives through

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the paradigm of ‘apologetic modernity’, denoting an ethos in which Muslim thinkers in the colonial era felt impelled to argue about a modernity that was authentically rooted in Islam.286 Ironically, in case of both Hindu-Indian and Indo-Islamic thinking, arguments about ancient constitutionalism (rooted in Vedic or Islamic pasts) became sites for intense confessional one-upmanship, especially in a context of colonially-mediated sectarian competition over electoral representation, jobs, education and land-control.

Yet, there was a broader popular context which inspired Indo-Islamic thinking about democratic rulership as well. Bengal, for example, possessed a long and rich Islam-inflected tradition of peasant rebellion. As Gautam Bhadra has shown, in one such insurgency, the Pagal Bidroha of the 1820s/30s (in eastern Bengal), the rebels hoped to substitute the kingdom of God (khodar rajya) for the oppressive colonial state and the indigenous landlords; this polity would be ruled ‘in God’s name and with the subjects’ consent’ (khodatalar name, prajader sammatikrame). Popular expectation about the human ruler of such a state is evident in the use of Islamic (faqir badshah) and Sanskritic (rajarshi) titles for the leader Tipu Shah: both terms denoted the ‘ascetic king’ who would mediate between popular power and divine authority.287 Comparable attitudes animated the peasant revolt of Titu Mir in the late 1820s and early 1830s.288 It could be argued that such subaltern discourses, by linking divine and popular power, also made it plausible for middle-class Muslim intellectuals (at least in Bengal) to think about a certain denuding of kingship. In this paradigm, the king’s authority was transitory, standing in for another formation of power. Thus, in Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s Vishada Sindhu, Hasan noted: People call me the ruler (raja) of Medina, but brothers, do not listen to that! No one is a ruler over another in this world. Everyone is a subject (praja) of the kingdom of that great king, the king of all kings, the one without a partner (the one without a second), the merciful one.289

Parallel reflections on ascetic rulership, as a mediating point between popular militancy and divine sovereignty, can be found in Hindu-Indian discourses (as in Bankimchandra’s novels Anandamatha and Devi Chaudhurani), as well as in (at least two) celebrated episodes in Bengal, in the early-nineteenth century and in interwar years, when popular enthusiasm, cutting across sectarian lines, rallied around ascetic figures who claimed to be lost zamindar rulers.290 Chapter 5 will discuss ascetic kingship in more detail, focusing also on the icon

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of ‘Gandhi Maharaj’.

In the context of European-Christian theology and history, Giorgio Agamben has referred to the ‘original vicariousness of sovereign power’.291 In colonial India, a comparable vicarious sovereignty was in operation when political actors claimed to rule not on their own behalf, but on behalf of someone else. It can be argued that, in contrast to British imperial ideology – where the monarchic sovereign and the imperial state ruled on behalf of their own proper selves – the specificity of democratisation, in an anti-colonial mode, lay in refusing to identify such a fixed sovereign. A space for democracy was opened up when people claimed to rule on behalf of an absent/disembodied divine, or on behalf of other human beings. Representation occurred through a deferral, through a reference to something beyond, something unnameable, but which was not an embodied human sovereign. I draw my theorisation here from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, called ‘Pratinidhi’ (Representative, 1897), which offers a precocious definition of political representation (so necessary a component of democratic politics) as an endless circulation of (now to draw on Agamben) vicarious sovereignty. The poem describes how, on seeing his preceptor Ramdas begging, Shivaji offered him his kingdom and joined him in mendicancy. Ramdas finally instructed Shivaji to take back the kingdom, but to rule it like an ascetic renouncer, as a mendicant’s representative: ‘to have a kingdom (rajya), and yet be without a kingdom’. This does not mean that Shivaji ruled simply as a vicar of Ramdas, that the political ruler became a mere agent of a religious ruler. Echoing the Ramayana, where prince Bharat placed his exiled brother Rama’s sandals on the throne and ruled on his behalf, the poet suggested that Ramdas (whose name literally means ‘servant of Rama’) ruled on behalf of (the absent) divinity. But this polity was not a theocracy either, where God was a reigning sovereign. Not only was God not directly visible, but, according to the poem, even God went like a beggar from heart to heart, asking people for love. God was a king (raja), but not a self-sufficient autocrat: he needed others.292 The absence of a sovereign, at least the absence of a non-vicarious (human, or perhaps even divine) sovereign, made political representation possible. Nationalist playwrights dramatised this paradox in other ways. Plays like Manomohan Basu’s Harishchandra Natak,293 or Mahendra Gupta’s Rani Bhavani,294 distinguished between the good ruler (who did not want to rule) and the bad (often, British) ruler (who enjoyed the act of ruling). To be udasi,

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to be indifferent to power, to have the desire to renounce, was thus the perfect qualification for rulership, since it signified the absence of a tyrannical potential. In this vein, Gandhi idealised the model ruler, human and divine, as a selfcontrolled, almost neutered, being (in contrast to the macho sovereign of British colonial or many strands of Indian nationalist politics). Such a being operated through rules, rather than through arbitrary power. Asking Indian princes to cut down their expenses, Gandhi thus noted in 1925: He who sets limits to his own authority, is the real Ruler. God has Himself set limits to His own power, and in spite of having the capacity to misuse that power, He does not do so. [...] The perfect brahmachari, by voluntarily conserving his energies, reaches such a state that finally he becomes, as it were, impotent. That state is beyond description. It is beyond all duality. Though he appears corporeal, he is pure and immutable spirit. That is why the English maxim says: “The king can do no wrong.” The author of the Bhagavata says that the Radiant One can do no wrong. Tulsidas remarked in his sweet Hindi: “Oh holy man! The Mighty can have no faults.” In our age, all these three maxims are being misinterpreted; and it is believed and said that the powerful one even though he commits an offence cannot be guilty. The very opposite is true. He alone is strong who never misuses his strength and voluntarily renounces the misuse of his strength, so much so that he becomes incapable of such misuse. Why cannot our Rulers become so? Is it beyond their powers?295

In Indian nationalist discourses, the ideal ruler was also one who (like the ascetic) was capable of self-reflection on the nature and limits of power, who was, in short, a philosopher as well. Since the late-nineteenth century, the ancient Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius enjoyed some traction among Indians as such a monarch.296 In charged political discussions, including in the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947–48, Indian nationalists like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Brajeshwar Prasad invoked Plato: to them the philosopher-king offered a template for future Indian political leadership. For Radhakrishnan, the saffron colour in the Indian flag thus represented the ‘disinterested’ nature and ‘renunciation’ which he saw as an essential component of rajadharma (dharma of the ruler), and therefore, of Platonic Indian ‘leaders’. Prasad, on the other hand, cited Plato to virulently criticise electoral democracy.297 Jawaharlal Nehru had an especially complex stance towards the Platonic ideal. In his autobiography, he suggested that even Plato’s ‘philosopher-kings’ could not have maintained

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a sharp distinction between ‘public good’ and private interests; they could not be adequate trustees of the people.298 But later, as Prime Minister (in a speech at Columbia University in 1949), he expressed hope that the principles of the philosopher could be combined with the politician’s practical approach, in the manner of Plato’s philosopher-kings.299

For many Indian intellectuals, however, the route to just and welfareoriented governance lay not (just) in ‘good’ kings, but (also) in institutional controls. Debates on such controls over rulership and state power assumed special urgency in the 1910s, in the context of debates about devolution of governmental powers to Indians: a trajectory which would culminate in the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, as well as the emergence of anti-colonial mass insurgency in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In this context, and authored during a tumultuous decade, K. P. Jayaswal’s book Hindu Polity argued that precolonial Indian history was characterised not by autocratic rulerships, but rather by constitutional monarchies and even republics or ganarajyas. The moral was clear: British administrators and Indian publics needed to come together to synthesise these traditional Indian constitutionalist notions with modernWestern, and especially British, ones. Westminster-style constitutional kingship needed to be indigenised in India, Jayaswal felt, especially since India had its own millennia-old heritage of constitutional rulership and republicanism: ‘What a coincidence that the race which evolved the greatest constitutional principles in antiquity should be placed today in contact with the greatest constitutional polity of modern times.’ Jayaswal’s aim was to de-racialise and provincialise the idea of constitutional rulership: it was, he thought, no monopoly of the European races. ‘Constitutional or social advancement is not a monopoly of any particular race. I am not a believer in the cheap wisdom which preaches that political greatness is inherent in some peoples.’300 Jayaswal identified specific institutions in ancient India, like samiti, a ‘national assembly of the whole people’, ‘a sovereign body’; sabha, ‘a distinguished popular body’; janapada or ‘realm assembly’; and paura or ‘assembly of the capital city’, through which the king’s powers were kept in check.301

In narrating this history of popular checks on the powers of the ruler, Jayaswal mapped theories of social contract on to ancient India. He felt that the arajaka or kingless republics had first evolved such theories; here state sovereignty was founded in the social contract between citizens. Later, monarchist theorists picked it up to visualise the state as founded in a contract

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between the people and their ruler: On the basis of a mutual contract amongst the citizens, according to the Arajaka democrats, the state was founded. This, of course, was true of the Arajaka state. When the monarchists postulate a contract between the king and the people (to take office on condition to rule honestly and to receive taxes in return) they clearly say that this contract was resorted to when the contract of the Arajaka constitution failed in practical working. Here we find the monarchists really adopting the social contract theory originally postulated by the Arajakas. Probably a theory of social contract was common to all classes of republics. Its counter-part, applied to monarchy, was already known to Kautilya as an accepted truth. Its origin in India is very ancient, evidently the most ancient in the world.302

Jayaswal made another significant point while discussing a particular form of constitution known as dvairajya, where two rulers or ruling lineages ruled jointly over a territory. He felt that a Hobbesian understanding failed to interpret such a duocentric, or potentially even polycentric, arrangement of power which was sometimes practised in historical reality in ancient India (he took specific cases from India and Nepal). Jayaswal argued that one root of such political polycentricity lay in the Hindu model of the joint family: if a joint family exercised power through an arrangement bound by real kinship, then multiple rulers or ruling lineages could similarly exercise power through a contract which bound them in artificial kinship. Linking kinship, contract and state sovereignty, Jayaswal observed: Hobbes’ doctrine of indivisible sovereignty would not allow a foreign student to grasp the inscriptions of Nepal. But in India, where joint-family is a living doctrine, it is explicable. […] It seems that the legal principle of joint property and joint enjoyment was transferred to the region of politics and acted upon, whereby ‘conflict’, ‘rivalry’ and ‘annihilation’ could be avoided for centuries. The Nepal families were not related by blood. It was only the constitution which made them joint twins in sovereignty.303

Pramathanath Banerjea was another celebrated historian of this 1910s generation who interpreted ancient Indian political thought and practice through the prism of social contract. His book, Public Administration in Ancient India (1916) was the product of a doctoral dissertation at the University of London. It suggested that in ancient India, ‘the relations between the ruler and

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the ruled were contractual’, the ‘State existed for the well-being of the people’, and the king enjoyed his position ‘to further such well-being’. Banerjea quoted the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata: ‘A King […] who is unable to protect, is useless. If the King fails in his duties, any person, no matter to what caste he belongs, may wield the sceptre of government.’ He quoted the Shukraniti on how ‘the people should expel’ such a ruler.304 Apart from popular will, Banerjea also emphasised institutional and legal checks on the king: for him, the ancient Indian state was generally a ‘constitutional monarchy’.305

In offering this interpretation, Banerjea was influenced by European social contract theories. He quoted Hobbes’s Leviathan to emphasise the way in which the state came into being to enable human beings to get ‘themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre’ in which they would otherwise be enmeshed owing to their ‘naturall Passions’. Banerjea also cited Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Rousseau’s Social Contract. He then read the Mahabharata, Manu, Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Buddhist texts to argue that similar theories could be found in ancient India, justifying the creation of the state on grounds of ending conflicts between human beings and ensuring ‘the common weal’. Some Indian theories of an originary righteous age when ‘there was no sovereignty, no king, no government, no ruler’ (Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata) resembled the state of nature discussed by Locke and Rousseau; in this view it was only because of later human ‘Love of acquisition’ and ‘covetousness’ that a state needed to be created. Other ancient Indian authors had a more Hobbesian understanding where the state arose to remove ‘fear’ (Manu) and to prevent ‘the weak […] [from being] oppressed by the strong’ (Kautilya).306 In any case, the classical Indian state was a contractual rulership for Banerjea, and not the kind of Oriental Despotism and autocracy which many colonial administrators and scholars argued it was.

Banerjea’s book, the (then forthcoming) volume of Jayaswal, and the researches of D. R. Bhandarkar (see below) were cited by Sankaran Nair, in his capacity as (the only Indian) Member of the Viceroy’s Council, during debates surrounding the Government of India Act of 1919. In a famous dissenting minute on constitutional reforms, Nair suggested that most colonial administrators conceptualised government reforms as implying transfer of powers from the British Parliament ‘to the executive governments in India’. Indians however desired delegation of powers ‘to popular assemblies in India’. This ran against colonial objections ‘that it is hopeless to introduce into

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India a government responsible to the people of the country, as any system of government other than that of absolute monarchy was unknown in India and is entirely foreign and repugnant to the genius of the people.’ Nair’s retort was that ‘non-monarchical forms of government are not foreign to the genius of the people.’ He cited classical writers like Arrian, Diodorus and Megasthenes, modern European scholars like Max Müller, Rhys Davids and Ernest Havell, and the Indian historians noted earlier. Nair referred to various popular assemblies which acted as a parliamentary check on the ruler, some of them existing into recent times, like Nair assemblies in Kerala, Jirgahs in the north-western frontier of India and ‘village assemblies’ and ‘caste assemblies’ more generally.307

Another product of this 1910s moment of constitutionalist thinking was Radhakumud Mookerji. Mookerji focused on devolving powers to local corporate bodies to engender a sort of democratisation from below. He looked to ancient India for inspiration in conceptualising such bodies, and claimed to identify in specific historical institutions of local self-government ‘a noteworthy democratic development in ancient India’, and ‘a great deal of socialism and communism’.308 Such a stance also had appeal for British statesmen and administrators: democratisation from below did not necessarily threaten imperial hegemony from above. Discussing Mookerji’s volume (published in 1919), former Secretary of State for India, the Marquess of Crewe, thus suggested that ‘great Indian empires’ could govern India in the past because of an extensive system of ‘local government’. He felt that the British could follow in their footsteps: he applauded the fact that the Decentralisation Commission of 1908-09 and the Montagu-Chelmsford reform proposals noted the virtues of ‘decentralized administration’.309 In this 1910s milieu, where Indians were vigorously debating the grounds of legitimacy of (colonial) state sovereignty, European social contract theories about kingship gained radically new traction in India. Banerjea and Jayaswal were part of a far broader field of discourse in this regard. Within this context, to take a dig at Hobbes could become a cipher for criticising the British government itself (a point we shall return to in Chapter 5 while discussing the trial of Muhammad Ali). Such an atmosphere affected a generation of nationalist scholars. For example, in 1918, in the prestigious Carmichael Lectures given by D. R. Bhandarkar at the University of Calcutta, the historian sought to challenge the assumption that European political thinking could be the sole repository

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of constitutionalist ideals. Taking the example of ideas of social contract, he observed: ‘So much do we read and hear of this view while studying European History that we are apt to suppose that a mental restlessness in this sphere was confined to Europe only and never manifested itself in the political horizon of ancient India.’ As a riposte, Bhandarkar read in the Mahabharata, in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and in the Buddhist texts Digha Nikaya and Mahavastu the notion that ‘sovereignty originated in a social contract’. He analysed terms like (the Buddhist) mahasammata which demonstrated the origin of rulership in the (contractual) consent (Sanskrit: sammata/sammati) of the people. Further, he suggested that such Indian theories had a wide transregional impact, informing political theories in ‘Ceylon, Burma and Tibet’.310 And finally, Bhandarkar used Hobbes (almost as a metonym for an entire continent) to proclaim the superiority of Indian contractarian ideas over European ones: The state of nature was therefore a state of war, which came to an end only when men agreed to give their liberty into the hands of a sovereign. I need not tell you that this [ancient Indian] view of the origin of society bears a remarkably close correspondence with that propounded by Hobbes. But Hobbes expounded this notion of Agreement by saying that absolute power was thereby irrevocably transferred to the ruler. Such was not, however, the case with the Social Contract theory advocated by the Hindu Arthasastra. According to the latter the king was still the servant of the people. The sixth part of the grains and the tenth part of the merchandise that was his due was but the wage that he received for his service to the people. This is the view not only of Kautilya and the Santi-Parvan but also of the authorities on the Dharmasastra. […] The king’s power can thus hardly be supposed to be absolute. And it is this feature that distinguishes the Hindu theory of Social Contract from that propounded by Hobbes, and marks its superiority over the latter. The king, according to the Hindu notion, thus never wielded any unqualified power, but was looked upon as merely a public servant though of the highest order.311

Another product of this ideological landscape was U. N. Ghoshal. In his 1923 book (the result of a doctoral dissertation from the University of Calcutta), he claimed to find in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and in one chapter of the Mahabharata a theory proximate ‘to the Hobbesian formula of bellum omnium contra omnes’, while in another chapter of the Mahabharata and in the Digha Nikaya, he saw portrayed ‘an original state of perfect peace and happiness followed after an interval by strife and violence’, ‘reminiscent of Grotius,

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Pufendorf, and Locke’. In general, he read in the Mahabharata and in the Digha Nikaya notions of social contract similar to that in Hobbes. While doing so, he absolved Hobbes of the charge of being an uncritical supporter of absolute power. Criticising Bhandarkar for proclaiming the ‘superiority of the Hindu theory over the Hobbesian’, Ghoshal observed that ‘even Hobbes permits the subjects to cancel their obligation to the sovereign in the event of the latter’s failure to protect them from the evil of anarchy’. Ghoshal thus read Hobbes, and ancient Indian texts through a Hobbesian lens, to support a limited state. His evaluation of Indian constitutionalism was relatively cautious. Criticising both Banerjea and Bhandarkar, Ghoshal commented that some passages in ancient Indian texts reminded one of doctrines of ‘popular sovereignty’, including that of ‘the right of deposition, and even that of tyrannicide’; but ancient Indian thinkers normally grounded royal authority in divinity and in the sacral ‘Law (Dharma)’ which was supervised by Brahmins, rather than in the will of the people.312 As a final instance, let me mention H. N. Sinha’s 1938 book, which resulted from a doctoral dissertation at the University of London. The book began with the remark: ‘Sovereignty is supreme power, and the modern state is the sovereign state.’313 In his project to find a parallel conception in ancient India, Sinha focused on the Vedic term kshatra, which he found ‘embodied in the king’.314 His reading of kshatra was structured by Hobbes: The Hindu conception of the prepolitical state of existence was, like that of Hobbes, one of endless strife. By a covenant, the gods put, as did the prepolitical men in the state of nature, in a common receptacle their own “favourite forms and desirable powers.” And then, as Hobbes thought the covenant became “for ever imperishable,” and whoever transgressed this covenant, was to be scattered to the winds. Thus as in the Social Contract theory, we have the origin of kingship or sovereignty – to the ancient Indians both the terms appeared identical in meaning – in a covenant that is indissoluble, and the nature of kingship comprising the collective powers of the community voluntarily resigned.315

Despite his general emphasis on royal power, Sinha added the proviso that the ancient Indian king was defined by law: he was rtasya gopah, ‘upholder of the Law’.316

We have briefly mentioned above how the Arthashastra appealed to many Indian nationalists because of its seeming advocacy of an idea of social contract.

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There were two other reasons for its remarkable popularity in nationalist circles. First, it became the exemplar par excellence of precolonial Indian political talent: the capability to think about, as well as instantiate, a welfare-oriented, centralised and deeply interventionist and planning-based administrative state. The text challenged European Orientalist assumptions that Indians had traditionally excelled only in the spiritual domain and that their neglect of political concerns rendered them unfit for self-governance. Soon after the discovery of the text in the 1900s, its authorship was attributed to Kautilya/ Chanakya, seen as a wily Brahmin who helped Chandragupta Maurya to found the Maurya imperial dynasty (by deposing the supposedly tyrannical Nandas) and then became his minister, paving the way for India’s national unity in a properly political mode. Kautilya/Chanakya became the hero of literary, theatrical and historical works in Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and Oriya.317 Radhakumud Mookerji declared the Arthashastra to be superior to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (because that only dealt with ‘practical regulations’) as well as to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics (because these were too theoretical).318 Meanwhile, Narendra Nath Law suggested that the text presented ‘those regulations and institutions which ensure the material welfare of a country’.319 The status of this Arthashastra-embedded Maurya rulership was bolstered by the fact that Ashoka had been a scion of the same dynasty. To politicians like Jawaharlal Nehru, Maurya kingship thus came to symbolise both a centralised national polity as well as (thanks to Ashoka) a transregionally-expansive and hegemonic, yet pacifist, model of statehood: an enticing model for independent India, as it hoped to become a vanguard of decolonising nations. At a reception given in Calcutta in 1955 to honour the Soviet leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Nehru thus suggested that modern Indian foreign policy was proximate to Ashoka’s political ethics in being based on ‘peaceful co-existence and co-operation’ with all nations.320 Not surprisingly, after intense political discussions, including in the Constituent Assembly, about sacred rulership, postcolonial India’s state symbols – including the wheel in the national flag as well as the state emblem – came to be adopted from Maurya regal iconography, epitomised by the lion capital of an Ashokan pillar.321 A second reason for this popularity of the Arthashastra lay in the fact that, in Indian nationalist discourses – D. L. Roy’s play Chandragupta (1911) is absolutely paradigmatic here – the alliance of Chanakya/Kautilya with

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Chandragupta Maurya was interpreted more broadly as an alliance of the Brahmin and the Shudra, of the high caste and the low caste, which enabled the emergence of a sovereign Indian nation-state in antiquity.322 Such a vision responded to the challenges posed to high caste elites by the rise of non-Brahmin politics (see Chapter 4), even as it reframed older Brahmanical nationalist ideas which regarded the Brahmin (rather than the Kshatriya king) as the true ruler in ancient India. In the late-nineteenth century, Bankimchandra had naturalised this argument, for example, by referring to the superiority of the civilian administration over the military in colonial India.323 Vivekananda had cast this in terms of the Brahmin’s legal and ethical superiority, as one who was the ‘great ideal of India’; ‘Property-less, selfless, subject to no laws, no king except the moral.’324 Scholars have often noted how, in the early-mid twentieth century, nationalist politicians like Gandhi and Nehru sought to reform, rather than completely negate, Brahmanical caste ideals.325 It is likely that Nehru, in invoking, even identifying with, Chanakya,326 found appealing a Brahmanical model of civilian rulership. In the Constituent Assembly, Radhakrishnan was among the champions of such a Brahmanical understanding of kingship, as he sought to frame dharma as itself the true ruler and sovereign in India: Much has been said about the sovereignty of the people. We have held that the ultimate sovereignty rests with the moral law, with the conscience of humanity. People as well as kings are subordinate to that. Dharma, righteousness, is the king of kings. Dharmam Kshatrasya Kshatram. It is the ruler of both the people and the rulers themselves. It is the sovereignty of the law which we have asserted.

Radhakrishnan asserted this Brahmanical argument of rule of law to justify, very specifically, the imposition of limits on the powers of the native princes as well as of the people.327

Some Indian nationalists located Indian constitutionalism within a classical Indo-European or ‘Aryan’ past. Writing in the early 1930s, Jawaharlal Nehru suggested that the powers of the ancient Indian king were limited by Aryan laws and customs, and further, the people could depose him.328 Historians like U. N. Ghoshal and Radhakumud Mookerji observed that Vedic political institutions as well as later corporate bodies of ancient India shared a similar origin as ancient European assemblies and city-states.329 Citing the legal

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philosopher Luigi Miraglia, Pramathanath Banerjea saw the limitation of kingship by rule of law as the distinguishing trait of Aryan (Indian and European) rulerships; contrastively, in non-Aryan societies, despotism was supposedly more common.330 H. N. Sinha argued similarly about the relation between Aryan law and kingship. The Aryans were supposedly the people of rta, of cosmic law, which was upheld in heaven by the sovereign gods Mitra and Varuna, and on earth by the king; supposedly, this distinguished them from non-Aryans.331

In search of an ‘indigenous’ genealogy of constitutionalist politics, Aurobindo Ghose mapped ancient India into a broader Indo-European institutional plan. According to him, the body politic in Aryan nations traditionally consisted of the king, the lords and the commons; this provided the root structure of governance for many modern nations too. While Aurobindo here obviously drew on medieval and modern British institutional forms, he suggested that ancient India had the same tripartite structure of governance. Though the commons gradually disappeared in India, the Hindu ruler was prevented from becoming a despot: he lacked legislative powers, while the people expressed their political will through demonstrations and resistance.332 Aurobindo further argued that, in modern India, the Congress had tried to revive this old constitutional structure: it functioned as an old Aryan assembly which every citizen could attend, while its Subjects Committee functioned like the Greek Boule or the Roman Senate. However, instead of thus reviving the democratic commons, the Indian National Congress had in fact degenerated into an elite institution, like the Greek ecclesia or the Roman comitia in the oligarchic periods of their history.333 Bipin Chandra Pal subscribed to a similar idea of a tripartite Aryan constitutional structure. According to him, in ancient India, power was constitutionally shared between the (initially, elected) king, Brahmanical councils with legislative competence, and popular assemblies with deliberative functions.334

Invoking a shared Indo-European or ‘Aryan’ past was a strategic move by Indian nationalists to claim parity with their British masters, at a time when racialised discourses on civilization were in vogue across Europe. By suggesting that Indians were heirs of the same Aryan historical stock of constitutional governance and limited kingship as were Europeans, they rhetorically strengthened the demand for devolution of governmental powers to Indian nationalist elites. Such arguments, which were often made by Hindu high-

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caste actors, also resonated with local equations of social power. By claiming, for example, that modern legal and democratic ideas could be found in Vedic texts, high-caste Hindu politicians and intellectuals could claim a privileged position as purveyors of an indigenous Brahmanical constitutionalism, establish their ‘fraternal’ bonds with Europeans, and claim a sort of racialised superiority against sectarian others (such as Muslims) and ‘non-Aryan’ populations (within India and outside). At work here was often a real affinity for liberal-democratic governance and constitutionalism, combined with a Brahmanically-oriented sensibility about moral-legal normativity and related social gradations. Christopher Bayly, while noting the long-term implications of such arguments, thus notes: Whereas in Malaysia, for instance, modernised monarchy could be seen both as a redoubt of Islam and as a reflection of the will of the people, the presence of a Brahmanical order ritually superior to the aristocracy, combined with liberal distaste for despotism, established a different sensibility in India.335

One could go deeper into history while tracking the genealogies of such arguments. The French scholar Georges Dumézil has suggested that IndoEuropean cultures have traditionally classified society into a trifunctional hierarchy of sacred-juridical sovereigns, warriors and common people. The power of warrior kingships has been limited in such societies by belief in a higher order of law and by the authority of those who claimed to know and interpret that law. Dumézil and his followers have further claimed to draw from this ideological classification the genealogies of concrete institutional models prevalent in Indo-European societies, including classical Greek and Roman institutions, the three estates model of political and social organization that was common across medieval and early modern Europe, as well as the English parliamentary system. If we assume a certain plausibility with respect to this (admittedly controversial) hypothesis, there was more than a sleight of hand involved in the way in which late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Indian actors invoked Indo-European history. In fashioning an ‘Indian’ constitutionalism, they were in fact drawing on centuries-old Euro-Asian vocabularies of law and limited kingship, even while inventively transforming these traditions whole-scale to make them compatible with modern-Western, and especially British parliamentary, forms of rule. These Indian actors sought to curtail the possibility of despotic rule, while also reining in popular radicalism.

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In steering such a constitutionalist middle path, they strategically drew on highcaste Brahmanical ideas of legal-moral order, as well as on modern-Western political models. This resulted in discourses and practices of sovereignty that eventually outlived colonialism, and arguably provided a basis for postcolonial formats of governance in India: a hybrid style of mixed constitution which balanced popular-democratic representation (through various legislative bodies and parties mediating the will of the electorate) with a strong executive (with its apex in the Prime Minister and the Cabinet), and with institutionalised – legislative and judicial – checks on democratic radicalism. Indian nationalists thus often made modern-Western parliamentary practices more acceptable to their social peers, by mapping them on to cognate Sanskritic/Indic concepts of law, limited kingship and conciliar governance.336 Many Indian thinkers made similar uses of Islamic political theory and history to forge a hybrid constitutional sensibility. For example, Ilyas Ahmad argued in his 1944 book that the ideal Islamic state was a ‘theocratic democracy’, which embodied ‘the divinely ordained method of democratic government’.337 The early Caliph ‘was an elected chief of the nation’ and ‘he was not merely representative in the sense of Hobbes’ sovereign, but was also responsible unlike him, and in complete conformity with Locke’s interpretation of responsible government.’338 From this view, the rulership of Prophet Muhammad manifested divine as well as popular sovereignty. Islam was fashioned into an expression of Rousseau’s general will and republican community, and a counterpole to the Hobbesian Leviathan: In Rousseau, the good will of each creates a new entity in the Sovereignty of the General Will of the Community, in Islam also the good will of each creates a new Community as a new entity by itself (out of the individualism of the State of Nature); but this Sovereignty of the Community is vested in the only Supreme God of the Universe who is the Be-all and End-all of all things. Thus if Hobbes had created a ‘Mortal God’ in his ‘Leviathan’, and Rousseau a General will as absolute as the sovereign of Hobbes, Islam believes in the really Absolute Immortal Sovereign Who is more true, in every sense, of the powers ascribed to the mortal sovereign of Hobbes, and the phantom sovereign of Rousseau. The sovereign of Hobbes as being absolute, permanent, unlimited, illimitable, indivisible, inalienable, omnipotent and omnicompetent has been found to be unreal in practice every where. [...] the general will of the Islamic people or of the state of Arabia found its real expression in the personality of the Prophet. The Prophet was, therefore, in

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a real sense, a better representative of the people, for he was not occupying his place as a hereditary king but as God’s and peoples’ elect.339

Some Indian politicians of Hindu origin were also attracted by such readings of Islam as an originary source of democratic politics. For example, Sarojini Naidu argued in a meeting in Patna in 1917 that the ‘first of the great world religions that thirteen hundred years ago laid down the first fundamental principles of Democracy was the religion of Islam.’ In India, Islam spread ‘that human sense of Democracy that makes the king and the beggar equal’. She repeated this message in several meetings in India, Britain and Ceylon in the late 1910s and early 1920s, while building a trans-sectarian anti-colonial platform.340 Later, in the 1930s, M. N. Roy related the monotheism of Islam to the unity of the early Arab market and of the Arabo-Islamic civic community: ‘The unity of the economic interest of the decentralised nation had created at Mecca a symbol of precarious spiritual unity.’341 In Roy’s Marxist political theology, the transition from polytheism to monotheism marked the transformation of an archaic social order ridden with unresolved class tensions into a revolutionary centralised state. For Roy, Islam fostered ‘national unity’ and ‘absolute sway of one supreme God’ which ‘can alone encourage people to revolt against the tyranny of a whole host of tribal deities’.342 By reinforcing rational civilization and material progress, it ultimately enabled ‘the eighteenth century Enlightenment and Bourgeois Revolution’.343 The noted Indo-Muslim thinker Muhammad Iqbal underlined in his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930, 1934): ‘The republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the world of Islam.’344 But Iqbal’s privileging of Islam as a democratic religion, like the comparable views of Hindu-Indian nationalists who rooted Indian constitutionalism in a sacralised past, accentuated sectarian pride and confessional difference.345 In contrast, Kazi Nazrul Islam drew on Islamic theology and history, as well as on Indic notions of shakti, to conceptualise divine unity as a space of equality of all human beings, including non-Muslims and women.346 As visible in an article he penned in 1941, responding to accusations that he was against the Muslim League, at the heart of the poet’s political vision was an idea of divine monarchy, where ‘Allah alone is the king of kings (rajrajeshvara) of this world’ and the human being was ‘the khalifa of Allah, that is, his representative (pratinidhi), his ‘viceroy’.’ Nazrul drew on

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Islamic and Advaita-Sanskritic idioms to describe Allah as the one ‘without a partner (la-sharik), the one without a second (ekamevadvitiyam)’. Such a perspective enabled a radical democratic subjectivity: Nazrul affirmed that he had no ‘master (prabhu) except the one Allah. My only religion of humanity (manava-dharma) is to obey him.’ This faith in divine unity also implied belief in ‘universal brotherhood’ and ‘freedom of all people’, transcending ‘hatred against any religion (dharma), nation (jati) or human being.’ For Nazrul, ‘the kingdom of Allah (Allar rajatva)’, as opposed to the divisive politics of the League and the Congress, was thus embedded in the sacrally-constituted and politically valent indivisibility and equality of all humanity.347

In the interwar years, Hindu-Indian nationalists – many of them high-caste men from Bengal and Maharashtra – often drew upon decades-long discourses on command-oriented nationalist kingship as well as on newer European fascist ideas in order to conceptualise a militant nation-state. For example, V. D. Savarkar celebrated Hindu warrior kings (like Shalivahana, Prithviraj, Rana Pratap and Shivaji), even as he drew on European fascist ideologies.348 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, as we have already seen earlier, moulded precolonial Indian kingships into templates of national sovereignty; in the interwar years, he also found much to celebrate in Hitler.349 The translation between kingly and fascist role models is strikingly visible in B. S. Moonje. As Marzia Casolari has noted, Moonje was deeply inspired by Fascist Italy – he met Mussolini in 1931 – and observed in 1934 that Indians needed ‘our own swaraj with a Hindu as a dictator like Shivaji of old or Mussolini or Hitler of the present day in Italy and Germany.’350 Similarly, in a volume on Mussolini published in 1927, Taranath Ray used images of sacrality, salvation, apocalypse and incarnation (mantra, diksha, trana, pralaya, avatirna) to describe Mussolini as an ideal ruler, suggesting that the Duce, inspired by Machiavelli’s Prince, felt that ‘the state is made manifest as an icon in the king’ (rashtra murti parigraha kare rajate). Taranath hoped that a leader like Mussolini, Lenin, or (the Polish leader) Jozef Pilsudski should be born in India.351 Dedicated to the Italian Orientalist Giuseppe Tucci and his wife, the Bengali scholar Pramathanath Ray’s translation (1929) of Paolo Orano’s biography of Mussolini suggested that through Mussolini, Italy appeared as a devata (god) to Italians, and nationalism became united with dharma. The Italian realised God’s satta (existence) in the fatherland.352 The metaphysics of presence, of iconisation, of visualising the nation through the sovereign-deity, haunted these discourses. European fascist

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ideas were thus often indigenised into Indian political vocabularies through being grafted on to templates of sacred-national militant rulership.

Historians have sometimes suggested that the emergence – and eventual crisis and failure – of militant national monarchies in modern Italy and Germany prepared the ground for the later advent of non-royal dictatorships in those countries: that is, singular rulerships in the royal mode paved the way for singular rulerships in the fascist-dictatorial style.353 Whatever the merits of this argument in relation to Europe, we can say that, in South Asia, the traction of Italian and German dictatorial models in Indian nationalist discourses can be explained, in part, as the successor of earlier Indian admiration for Italian and German national monarchies: that is, in terms of the fascination with a centralised executive state which could supposedly bring about national unity and sovereignty with rapidity, if necessary with ruthless violence. Further, some Indian nationalists adopted from fascism an aggressively racist way of thinking about a militant Hindu nation. Others extolled Mussolini for allegedly proclaiming the equal status of Asians and Europeans. They saw him as an heir to Mazzini and Garibaldi, and as the saviour of a nation which, like India, had a ‘classical’ past and, now, a renovated future.354 Many Indians however bracketed Nazi and Fascist templates of racist statehood – whose imperialist motives were exhibited in Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, German imperialism in Eastern Europe and in the Spanish Civil War – with British colonialism: consequently, they resisted the dark seduction of fascist models of power.355 Rabindranath’s response to Italian Fascism represents some of the ambiguities in Bengali conceptualisation of European dictatorships of the interwar era. His Fascist-sympathiser Italian acquaintances had arranged his visit to Italy in 1926. However, other friends of the poet, and especially the French author Romain Rolland, soon made him aware of the brutalities being committed by Mussolini’s regime.356 Rabindranath’s initial attraction towards Mussolini stemmed from his long-standing critique of the alleged ‘mechanisation’, ‘abstraction’ and ‘impersonality’ characteristic of modernity. As Giuseppe Flora has noted, ‘The emphasis on personality along with a certain encrustation of romanticized history, in the wake of Carlyle’s hero worship, might have misguided Tagore’s judgment on Mussolini in 1926 and soon after.’357 I would add that there was also a kingly subtext at work here. In reaction to modernity and its ‘impersonal’ power, Rabindranath had earlier valourised the rulers of Tripura and Japan, offered the vision of an Indian

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nationalist samajpati and adhinayaka, and finally cast God as a monarch who ensured personal and national salvation and progress through suffering and grief. In a comparable vein, Rabindranath confessed in Zurich in 1926 that: the human element – even in politics – touches me more deeply than abstract theories. Modern civilisation is too scientific, too impersonal for me. Therefore personality is always attractive to me. The expression of the personal man in his work may not be good, may even be terrible, but when it makes itself powerfully evident is fascinating.

Mussolini’s ‘masterful personality’ ‘enabled him to obtain such perfect mastery over a whole people. His great dramatic personality brought to my vision a man riding upon a wild horse, who by his marvellous strength checked almost an insane people and controlled them’. Rabindranath underlined that he ‘did not support Fascism, though I did express my admiration for Mussolini as possessing a personality only which can effect all miracles of creation in human history.’ He felt deceived by the positive descriptions of Fascist rule offered to him by Italians and by British expatriates in Italy; he had assumed that Mussolini rescued Italy from economic catastrophe. But, despite everything, Rabindranath felt alienated by Fascism because of its dependence on violent state power; here he demonstrated an anxiety which was, in fact, present in many other Indian actors of the colonial era as well. He thought it deplorable ‘to terrify a whole people into a unanimity of expression’. If  ‘Italy in the pursuit of her political power and material gain had sacrificed some universal idea of humanity she deserves condemnation’. A ‘mere discipline of law and order is not a final gain’; ‘permanent gifts of the spirit’ and ‘freedom’ were needed. Rabindranath also compared the violence of Italian Fascism to British atrocities in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), thus bracketing fascist and colonial violence.358

In his celebrated play ‘Raktakarabi’ (1926), Rabindranath critiqued state violence by showing its underpinnings in economic exploitation of the common people: in the play, specifically in the form of industrial mining and factory labour. Drawing on left-democratic vocabulary, he castigated modern idioms of ‘development/progress’ (unnati), which served as a cipher for oppression. The state was embodied here as a demoniac king (raja); popular rebellion against this king was interpreted in terms of ‘class’ (shrenigata) ‘conflict’ (virodha).359 In other interwar writings, Rabindranath’s critique of authoritarian nationalism and state violence was articulated through a critique of theology. He cast sectarian-

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racial nationalism as a kind of false religion which had first revealed itself in history in the way in which ‘tribes’ (upajati) built their exclusive identities around particular deities. (Jesus and Buddha were praised for offering freedom from such exclusivism).360 By the 1930s, Rabindranath regarded Mussolini and Hitler as the latest expressions of such chauvinism and violence (with fascism functioning as a kind of ersatz theology): they were ‘priests collecting human sacrifices for worshipping power (shaktipujay narabalisamgraher kapalika)’, whom Indians were warned not to emulate.361 Nepal Majumdar has discussed in detail Rabindranath’s active role, across the 1930s, in aligning Bengali as well as global public opinion against fascism.362 Further, the poet and his Santiniketan circle made significant attempts to establish connections with Jewish individuals in this era and attempted to offer refuge to some of them.363

A further layer of ambiguity can be seen in Rabindranath’s appreciation of Subhas Chandra Bose, a Bengali politician who was inspired by various interwar European models of militant-authoritarian statehood (of fascist as well as Soviet varieties), and who eventually allied with the Axis Powers in order to liberate India from British rule. Despite Rabindranath’s rejection of Nazism and Fascism (by the 1930s), the poet saw in Bose a charismatic icon who could unify India, or at least Bengal. Invoking the avatara ideal of the divine saviour celebrated in the Gita, Rabindranath recalled in 1939 how he had given the call for an adhinayaka in the 1900s. He now urged Bose to unify Bengal as its deshanayaka (nayaka/leader of the country): ‘If through the centralized attraction of one (ekjaner kendrakarshane) all people of the country become one, only then can impossible things be achieved.’ This nayaka would express the ‘will’ (ichchha) of the nation.364 The subtext of messianic rulership is further visible in the manner in which Rabindranath dedicated, in 1939, the second edition of his play ‘Tasher Desha’ to Bose. The hero of the play was a prince who brought change and ‘progress’ to a ‘stagnant’ society: a role comparable to what Rabindranath perhaps envisaged for Bose, with respect to India.365 Admittedly, Bose never advocated racism or sectarianism in the manner of Hitler or Mussolini (or Savarkar or Moonje); further, his anti-colonial militancy offered political agency to sectarian minorities (such as Muslims and Sikhs) and to women.366

Fascist concepts had a limited traction in interwar Indo-Islamic politics.367 More generally, Indo-Islamic politics, especially in the 1940s, placed significant importance on righteous rulership. In particular, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s

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leadership of the Pakistan movement was often conceptualised through models of prophetic and kingly authority. As scholars have noted, Jinnah was sometimes compared with ‘heroic’ sovereign figures like Moses or Nadir Shah.368 Bengal was no exception to this trend. In Pakistan-oriented poetry of the 1940s, Jinnah was sometimes invested with a kind of kingly authority. Muhammad Raushan Ijdani thus described him as a shahanshah and maharaja, compared him with the caliphs Umar, Usman and Ali and with samrat Saladin, and argued (in a contractarian mode) that the people had accepted Jinnah’s authority through a bayat. Other poets saw Pakistan as a kingly land: one which would (as Shahadat Hosen noted) see the resurrection of the Mughals and the advent of new Shah Jahans and Aurangzebs, or (as Talim Hosen emphasised) would be a ‘holy Islamic sultanate’ (pak islami sultanat) based on the Caliphate model of Umar and Ali. Farrukh Ahmad too saw Pakistan as a fulfilment of the political vision of the righteous caliphs. Many of these Bengali intellectuals saw Pakistan as a promised land which would offer material and spiritual prosperity and freedom to the poor and the oppressed.369

In the long run, such discourses about the Caliphate offered some theological justification for dictatorial rulers of Pakistan; in the Cold War era, they also sought to negotiate the spread of Communist ideologies. For example, the Bengali intellectual Golam Mostafa offered ‘Islamic’ legitimacy to Ayub Khan’s dictatorship (1958–69). Comparing the Islamic caliph and amir almuminin with Soviet ‘dictatorships’ of Lenin and Stalin, Mostafa argued that it was in Islam that true democracy could be found. He justified capital (punji) as long as zakat (Islamic alms) obligations were fulfilled. His contemporary, and far more ideologically left-inspired, Abul Hashim, in an influential and widely-translated volume (which also became a reference text in Cairo’s AlAzhar University) invoked the Caliphate ideal as an agent of political and economic justice, while dismissing the Communist vision of classless society. In these discourses, and in varying ways, democracy was redefined to imply the participation of citizens in an Islamic polity, in order to negate as well as appropriate the challenging left-democratic ideals of egalitarian distribution of wealth and political power. The Caliphate was thereby restyled – along an admittedly capacious ideological spectrum – into an ancestor of modern forms of national statehood.370

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3.10 Hobbes in the Constituent Assembly of India, ca. 1946–49 If we go through the debates which took place in the Constituent Assembly of India, we realise that, like the 1910s, the mid-late 1940s also formed an explosive moment of Hobbesian thinking in India, as the constitution of India was being drawn up in the image of a public contract. Several middle-rank politicians, most of whom have now been forgotten, participated in these debates. An immediate instigating factor was a resolution introduced by Nehru in the Assembly on 13 December 1946 (and adopted on 22 January 1947); among other things, this mentioned that ‘all power and authority of the Sovereign Independent India, its constituent parts and organs of government, are derived from the people’.371 Responding to this on 21 January 1947, Vishwambhar Dayal Tripathi, a representative from the United Provinces, argued that it was not enough to say that power was derived from the people; state power had to remain accountable to the people in perpetuity: In the 4th  paragraph it is stated that we will frame a constitution for a sovereign and independent India, wherein all powers and authority are derived from the people. So far as this principle is concerned, it is very sound and every one will welcome it. But those who are students of politics know how these principles were misused in many countries. One of my friends just referred to the Constitution of England and said how the same had been misused there. Many centuries ago, the renowned politician of England, Mr. Hobbes, had established the principle that all powers of State are derived from the people. But the monarchs of England misused this principle. The monarchs indeed accepted that all powers and authorities are derived from the people, but at the same time they told the world that once the people delegated the powers and authorities to the rulers, those powers no more remained with the people. The evil consequence of this we find in the theory of the “Divine Right of Kings” in history. Therefore, it is very essential that, where we say “all powers and authorities are derived from the people,” we must also make it clear that the same shall remain always vested in the people. And for this reason I attempted to put in an amendment to this effect. But for many reasons, the amendment could not be put in. Therefore, where we draft the Constitution later on, we must think over it and embody this in our Constitution.372

One way in which he hoped for such an outcome was by arguing for a constitution that was designed on ‘socialistic and positively not on a capitalistic basis’; this would involve, for example, fulfilling Congress electoral promises about ‘the abolition of the zamindari system, and the nationalisation of the key Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.004

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industries’.373 Another corollary of this Hobbes-inflected argument was that the Constituent Assembly was a body that directly reflected the sovereignty of the people and owed nothing to British colonial authority. If India would be constituted as a Hobbesian Leviathan, emerging from the people’s delegated (but not alienated) sovereignty, a socialist and sovereign state was, for Tripathi, the only logical outcome, in order to prevent the Leviathan from becoming an oppressor of the people: Therefore, we should now declare that this Constituent Assembly is a Sovereign body. It has derived its power and authority from the people and not from the British Parliament and we are not prepared to accept any limitation that the British Parliament may unconstitutionally impose upon it. I hope, in order to translate the principles embodied in the Resolution into practice, we will adopt all such measures that may enable us to establish an independent State in our land. It is crystal clear that our Independent State shall be established on socialistic lines so that the poor people of our land may be fully benefited.374

Another democratically-motivated use of Hobbes can be seen in an intervention by H. V. Kamath, a representative from Central Provinces and Berar, on 15 September 1949. This took place during a heated debate about an article in the draft Constitution dealing with protection of those arrested and kept in police custody. Kamath felt that the safeguards introduced were too limited; like many others in the Assembly, he hoped for stronger protection of individual liberties. Hobbes’s Leviathan became here a haunting metaphor for a carceral state: The eternal problem of governments all over the world has been how to reconcile the liberty of the individual in society with the safety and security of the State, and thinkers have widely differed on this point. Some have tried to exalt the State above the individual making it a leviathan making it a veritable supreme power, which can crush the individual without any compunction. There have been other thinkers who have sought to lay down the dictum that the State is for the individual, and not the individual for the State. We will have to strike a balance between these two: the individual for the State and the State for the individual. We should bear in mind that the State has been formed, has been brought into being by individuals acting together, acting in unison, and we must provide that the State will not unjustly, unfairly override the claims of the individual to Justice and liberty.375

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Kamath’s concern had a personal aspect, in the sense that (as he noted in the Assembly) he had himself been detained in the colonial state’s prisons, and had seen first-hand the operation of police atrocities against the detained. He also claimed to have seen such atrocities in a district where he had worked as a magistrate. Inspired in part by the post-war German Constitution, and in general working under the assumption that the postcolonial state should radically transform the penal system created by the British, Kamath argued: I think Dr. Ambedkar is not quite aware of the frequent cases of physical or mental ill-treatment to which detenus were subjected during the British regime, especially during the dark days of 1942 and immediately thereafter. In one or two prisons where I myself was detained, I personally knew of cases, where detenus in C class were beaten mercilessly and also subjected to all sorts of third-degree methods of torture. There were cases where detenus were given no clothes to wear and were made to shiver in severe cold in a state of nudity. There were other cases where the cells of detenus were flooded and the detenus had to pass hours on the damp floor which was not merely unhealthy, but definitely in some cases induced pneumonia and other diseases which proved fatal. […] It is a very unfortunate state of affairs that, after having proclaimed so many fundamental rights in our Constitution, we should proceed to abrogate them and in some cases even nullify them.376

In the end, thanks to the efforts of Kamath as well as many other politicians, somewhat stronger safeguards were introduced into the Constitution to protect the rights of those arrested, while the existing provisions were also more explicitly interpreted.377 The citations of Hobbes by Tripathi and Kamath thus need to be contextualised within the life-history of the early postcolonial state, as it sought to negotiate the rights of individuals, the drive to ensure social and economic justice for the poor, as well as the authority of a centralising and reformist Indian nationalist elite. These varying uses of Hobbes are symptomatic of some of the enduring policy decisions made by early postcolonial ruling classes. One can say with only a little dramatic exaggeration that, by 1949, as the Constituent Assembly was drawing near its end (it adjourned sine die on 24 January 1950), Hobbes had become, in some senses, even a convenient shorthand in the Assembly for the entire realm of state sovereignty as such, in the emerging era of Nehruvian leadership. In this milieu, Brajeshwar Prasad, a representative from Bihar, invoked

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Hobbesian anthropology to justify a strong executive state. Quoting, and modifying, the Leviathan’s famous description of the state of nature, Prasad argued that ‘the will of man is nasty, brutish and short.’ In Prasad’s view, rather than representing this ‘actual will’, the state ought to represent – Prasad here obviously drew on Rousseau – the ‘general will’. He commented: Dharma is in consonance with the fundamental principles of Democracy. The will to will the general will is the core of democracy. The essence of Democracy is the representation of the real will of the people as opposed to and distinct from the actual will. The actual will is surcharged with passion and prejudice. The actual will changes from moment to moment, from hour to hour and from day to day. It contains within itself all that is mean, stupid and foolish in human life. It can never be the basis of Government. The real will on the other hand is in consonance with the teachings of the great leaders of thought in human history. It is in consonance with morality.

This was the basis for a broader critique of ‘Parliamentarianism’. Instead, Prasad advocated a ‘unitary state’, in the firm control of an enlightened elite; the Soviet Union stood for him as a model here, in so far as the goal of such a state would be to ensure the eradication of ‘economic inequality or social injustice’. For Prasad, such a view was also embodied in the Indian ideal of rule of dharma, now reformulated in the image of Rousseau’s general will.378

It was from a very different perspective that Shankarrao Deo, a representative from Bombay Presidency, invoked Hobbes. Deo praised the fact that the Indian Constitution had taken (what he considered to be) the best elements from different political philosophies, historical experiences and constitutional models from around the world: The Preamble of the Constitution recognizes the sovereignty of the people and is in complete accord with the philosophy of Rousseau’s Social Contract. It is consistent with the theory of Separation of Powers of Montesquieu. Its secular character is in conformity with the spirit of the Renaissance. It has taken the federal institution, first adumbrated as a measure for practical politics at the time of the American Independence. […] Part III of the Constitution – the Fundamental Rights, and Part IV – the Directive Principles of the State – put forward in unmistakable terms the awareness of the makers of the Constitution of the principle of Rule of Law which is the bulwark of British liberty, as well as the impact of the Marxist philosophy on the life and society of man.379

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Deo celebrated the emergence of universal adult franchise in India in unequivocal terms: Our Constitution, we can assert, has given political freedom and democracy in full measure, because it is based on the principle of adult franchise. I know that there are people who fear the consequences of this privilege or right given to the masses. But I am sure this fear is due to the lack of faith in the people. If we have imbibed the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, then we can go ahead with full faith in our people, and if today there is any guarantee against the fissiparous or disruptive forces and tendencies in this country, then in my humble opinion, it is this principle of adult franchise. This guarantees us, as far as it is possible for a Constitution to guarantee, that the progress of this country will be on peaceful and democratic lines.380

But he lamented that none of the experiences of the ‘Indian Revolution’, and especially of the Gandhian insistence on non-violence and rural local self-government, were visible in the Constitution, except for some token mentions. To Deo, this meant that the postcolonial Indian state had now become a Hobbesian Leviathan, in some ways only a continuation of the British colonial state: an over-centralised polity – indeed, for Deo, an artificial man with a diseased anatomy – which could only inadequately ensure democracy. For Deo, the artificial man and the ‘common man’ stood here in an unresolved tension. The Hobbes/Rousseau binary articulated, in this imaginary, the potential conflict between state sovereignty and popular sovereignty/democracy. Ultimately, Deo did not negate the Constitution’s achievements, but he wanted it to evolve in a more democratic direction in the future: But we must regretfully admit that as far as we are concerned we are not in a position today to hold up the pattern of Constitution which can give us and the rest of the world a non-violent social order. Except section 44 on Gram Panchayat which runs four lines in this document of 395 articles and 8 schedules and a bare mention of cottage industries, there is no room for the Gandhian way under which the pyramid-like constitutional frame-work would be broad-based on the million panchayats vital with the initiatives and creative energy of the common man. […] I am afraid in this highly centralised Constitution of Indian Republic there is possibility of there being apoplexy of the heart and paralysis on the ends. And it is no wonder, because what happened on August 15, 1947 was a mere transfer of power. The British quitted but physically; they left behind many things

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that they had created during their long rule. […] We must stabilise but at the same time should we forget that what we stabilise today will grow like a Leviathan and cast its shadow. […] If we build today on the foundation of this Constitution of centralization par excellence we cannot any day reorient our life and society. […] I may say in conclusion that this Constitution gives us sufficient scope, if we remain true to our aspirations and to our ideals, to slowly bring about a social change, a vital and fundamental change without any violent change in the Constitution. This will enable us to realise our ideal which is a non-violent and non-exploiting society where all men will be equal and will have equal opportunity for their self-development. Then only will we be in a position to show the third alternative to the world.381

In sharp contrast, Hyder Husein, representing the United Provinces, offered a more positive appraisal of the Constitution. For him, the almost civil war situation visible in the violence of Partition epitomised a Hobbesian state of nature. He noted on 23 November 1949: With a view to the early recognition of our freedom, our leaders went the length of agreeing even to a partition of the country. But no one at that time realised that this would be a signal for man to turn a wolf to brother man, as the great English philosopher Hobbes said two hundred years ago – Homo Hominis Lupus. This is not the place to describe those horrible atrocities; but the misfortune is that some of its baneful effects still persist and affect even our daily life. The country has succeeded in solving much more complicated problems and I am sure it will rise to the occasion and get over this hurdle which stands in the way of national advancement.382

I would argue that, for Husein, the Constitution, and the resulting Indian state sovereignty, offered the route out of this bestial state of nature: the transition from Partition to Constitution was the transition from state of nature to state of sovereignty, order and progress, from wolf to man. For Husein, the Constitution inaugurated an entirely new temporality, one which however demanded complete unity on the part of Indians: We much realise that the time for criticism is over, and the time for implementation has arrived. It is our duty to make a united effort to give effect to it, both in letter and in spirit. It is then and then only, that our country can march forward with long strides. […] This is not the stage, nor the time for criticising the various provisions of this Constitution. There has been a good deal of it, both inside and outside this hall. […] I am however,

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bound to say that the product is one of which any nation can be proud. Let us then, pledge ourselves to give it our unstinted support without any mental reservations whatsoever. We have attained political freedom, and the need of the day is the economic uplift of the country, as for this alone freedom was worth fighting for. This requires greater labour, greater work and greater sacrifice than even the fight for freedom. It is not so difficult to destroy a thing as it is to construct it. With the termination of foreign domination in the land, we have full opportunity for constructive work. Let us then strive to build our India which will be worthy of its past and a pride for the future.383

As is evident, even as Hobbes became a metonym for state sovereignty in the Constituent Assembly, the divergent ways in which he was invoked by the different representatives demonstrated, as it were in a microcosm, the profoundly fractured genesis of the order of sovereignty in the modern Indian nation-state. Whether the state was a boon, a saviour from the realm of the wolf-man, or whether it was a bloated and diseased artificial man, one which threatened to suffocate the real man, remained an unresolved debate.

3.11 India in Asia: Kingship and the formation of Asian connections, ca. 1920–50 In a previous section, we had seen how Indians in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century drew upon British, German, Italian and Japanese monarchies to construct their royally-inflected discourses on nationalism. In this section, I shall argue that the interwar years constituted a new globallyentangled epoch of monarchic nationalism for various Asian societies. For many political actors across Asia, monarchy seemed to offer a privileged route to nation-building: by studying Bengali intellectuals who toured across SouthEast and West Asia and interacted with various monarchs and ruling elites, I shall argue that this assumption was in fact reinforced through transborder exchanges in royal-national models. While scholars have often reflected on the growth of transnational pan-Asian imaginaries in this era,384 I shall argue that kingship – as a political form as well as an intellectual category – had a special foundational role to play in the emergence of this globalised moment. The centrality of Bengali intellectuals in mediating these exchanges was occasioned, in part, by the Calcutta-based Greater India Society. As Susan

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Bayly has noted, intellectuals associated with this movement helped form new anti-colonial ‘Asian’ cultural imaginaries, even as they attributed a central constitutive role to Indian ‘civilization’ in the historical genesis of this Asia.385 In parallel, Indian, Chinese and Iranian merchants, professionals and labouring communities, including significant expatriate ones, also stood to benefit here: invocations of Asian high civilization frequently aestheticised, classicised and legitimated transfers of capital and labour between South, South-East and West Asia. Further, transnational interactions between intellectuals, rulers and politicians facilitated the growth of political dialogue between different Asian states, a process which would climax between the late 1940s and 1960s. The South-East Asia tour of Rabindranath Tagore and his associates, including Suniti Kumar Chatterji, in 1927 offered an early opportunity for such exchanges.386 One of the highlights of this tour was the visit to Bali. Here, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, a Brahmin like Rabindranath, often replaced his Western clothes with Brahmanical vestments, and took up the role of instructing the Balinese in ‘mainland’ Indian rituals, doctrines and (Sanskrit) language and literature and even performed some rites. Meanwhile, Rabindranath was frequently introduced as a mahaguru (great preceptor) to the Balinese. In a sense, the Indian intellectuals assumed the role of a Brahmin guru in spreading the message of Indian national civilization to the Balinese, even as the latter, and especially their rulers, were framed in the position of disciples eager to learn from the Indians. The Indians also hoped to learn more about classical Indian culture from the Balinese. Suniti records that tensions sometimes erupted between the Balinese Brahmins and the Indian visitors, though there were amicable exchanges of knowledge too.387 Rabindranath and Suniti attended several local festivals, some organized specifically for them by the local rulers. They were struck with admiration for what they regarded as creative syntheses between local and Indian rites, music, dance and drama. Bali’s ceremonies – whose majestic pomp would later lead Clifford Geertz to describe the island’s polities as ‘theatre states’388 – struck the Indians with wonder, though their sacralised response differed from Geertz’s gaze. Bali seemed to Rabindranath to offer a therapeutic cosmos. Witnessing the ceremoniousness of a royal funeral, he felt: Here there is no poverty, there is no disease, and the weather is felicitous. Filled with gods and goddesses, stories, and ceremonies (anushthana), the Hinduism of the Puranas is here in consonance with nature; this nature has

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introduced diversity and plenitude to the arts and social ceremonies here.389

The Indians were however impressed on hearing the Balinese ruler of Karangasem say that: god, temple, worship of gods, funeral, good conduct, observance of social rules and norms, all these are external ceremonies (bahya anushthana), these cannot be the ultimate goal (charama uddeshya) of human life. […] Gods are nothing, nirvana [extinction of the worldly self] is the only thing (devatara kichhu nay – nirvan-i hachchhe ekmatra vastu; in the Balinese-inflected Malay used by the ruler, dewa-dewa tida apa – nirwana satu).390

In contrast to Geertz, who saw ceremonies centring on divinised kings as the very centre and raison d’être of Balinese sovereignty, this ruler – at least as recorded for us by Suniti – placed salvation itself at the centre of reality, compared to which ceremonies and gods counted for nothing. In this view, at the heart of ceremonial sovereignty was a certain vacuum, a desire to eradicate that ceremonial power itself to reach the goal or object beyond. Suniti suggests that Rabindranath was deeply moved by the ruler’s statement and recorded his impression in a poem he wrote on Bali.391 Despite this ambivalence about royal ritual, the Balinese ceremonies still offered to the Indian visitors a space for imagining the recovery of tradition, for visualising indigenous sovereignty through indigenous kingships and for lamenting the supposed loss in India of such material, aesthetic and spiritual wealth and exuberance owing to British colonial rule.

Later, Javanese rulers organized similar ceremonies for the Indian visitors. Rabindranath humorously observed the intense politics behind such ceremonial, pitting, for example, his host at a dinner reception, the ruler Pakoeboewono X, against the Dutch Resident: ‘As two cranes, constantly encircling each other, dance with various sombre gestures, the Resident here and this raja spread such royal manners against each other.’392 Politics was indeed omnipresent in Java. The host of the Indians at Surabaya, Mangkoenogoro VI, had previously been embroiled in conflict with the Dutch and stepped down from his office. His successor Mangkoenogoro VII, the host of the Indians at Surakarta, was an important leader in the Javanese nationalist movement. This Javanese politics laid stress on the island’s classical history and its connections with India: hence Indo-Javanese heritage was the focus of many of the rituals and entertainments – often based on versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata

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– enacted at the behest of the Javanese rulers for the Indian tourists. A son of Mangkoenogoro VI introduced the Indian team to an array of Indonesian nationalists, many of them quite explicitly anti-Dutch in their politics. The talks given by the visitors on Indian culture, and their visits to sites of IndoJavanese heritage, thus directly fed into agendas of Javanese-Indonesian nationalism. At Bandung, Sukarno, the famous Indonesian politician (and later, first President of independent Indonesia), welcomed the Indians. The conversation touched on the Javanese movement for political freedom as well as on the Indian independence movement. Sukarno and his companions ‘knew a lot’ about Gandhi, Chittaranjan Das, Motilal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu. Suniti Kumar Chatterji noted: ‘Mr. Sukarno is a very intelligent and handsome young man. The poet and all of us liked these men a lot.’393 Afraid of such encounters, the British had kept the trip under surveillance. Later, on hearing that certain Javanese students wished to be educated at Santiniketan, British colonial officials in India and the British Consul-General at Batavia (Indonesia) exchanged anxious letters, and came to the decision that these students should be discouraged, given that several Indians at Santiniketan had been associated in the past with anti-colonial militancy.394 An analysis of the tour of 1927 reveals a remarkable phenomenon. Whereas the Dutch sought to strip the indigenous rulers of Bali and Java of substantive power – enabling the creation of ‘theatre states’395 – ritual and ceremonial still possessed a striking political potential. Rather than oppose pomp to power, ritual to politics,396 it is interesting to see how, in 1927, Indonesian rulers and politicians and their Indian interlocutors could use the very sinews of ceremonial to create a new discourse of national culture. The ‘theatre state’ was thereby transformed into a space for imagining national sovereignty in a transregional way, in a manner that had traction for both Indonesians and Indians. Despite the contestations between different Indian and Indonesian actors (for example, between the Bengali and the Balinese Brahmins), and despite Indian attempts to subsume these conversations within the rubric of ‘Greater Indian’ civilization, we see, in fact, the opening up of radically novel transnational spaces of imagining sovereignty. Rituals of kingship had a constitutive role in enabling this construction of anti-colonial spaces of ‘national culture’, even as they prefigured the political cooperation between Nehruvian India and Sukarno’s Indonesia in the heady days of the Non-Aligned movement. Rabindranath’s visit to Siam/Thailand, on his way back to India, embodied

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another fascinating crossroads encounter between Indian ideas of righteous nationalist kingship and South-East Asian ones. The poet as well as Suniti Kumar Chatterji envisioned Siam’s kingship as an extension of Indic – Hindu and Buddhist – rulership. Hence, sacral kingship offered to them the paradigmatic way of thinking about the historical and modern connections between India and Siam. Suniti was especially attracted to what he regarded as the Brahmanical-Hindu foundations of Siamese kingship, as rendered visible in kingly rituals, names, palace and temple architecture and royal Brahmins. This imagining of a Hindu connection also had a contemporary valence: there was a large (and mainly Hindu) Indian expatriate community in Siam, whom Suniti saw as a modern bridge between the two countries. In turn, this community, comprising traders, labourers and professionals, with origins in Gujarat, United Provinces, Bihar, Punjab and Bengal, warmly welcomed the Indian team: the visitors reflected their mother-country’s ‘glory’, an association which also promised an enhanced status for the diaspora. The Siamese kingship appeared to some of these Indians as a generous employer, and thus as a model ‘Hindu’ monarchy. As a group of Bhojpuri railway police workers declared to the poet in Hindi: We live very happily in this land; the country is good; the king (raja) too is good; the people of the country too are good. The king is Hindu, of the Buddhist sect (raja hindu hai, bodh-marg hai), is of honest character, these people like the people of Hindustan.

They ended with nationalist acclamations of ‘Vande Mataram’ (Homage to the Motherland: a popular anti-colonial Indian nationalist cry) and ‘Jaya Ramji’ (Victory to Rama): the latter may well have referred to both the Hindu god-king and to the Siamese monarch Rama VII.397

On his part, Rabindranath laid stress on the Buddhist aspects of Siamese kingship. In a poem he formally read out in the royal court, and then presented to King Rama VII in an official ceremony (the political pivot of the tour), Rabindranath argued that the people of Siam had been integrated by Indic Buddhism, ‘with one fixed centre and in the pursuit of supreme liberation, unifying all your subjects in single-minded devotion, with the power of one religion, one monastic community, one great preceptor (ek dharma, ek sangha, ek mahagurur shaktite).’398 Since the late-nineteenth century, and indeed until today, Siamese elites have presented monarchy and Buddhism as the twin pillars

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of Siamese/Thai nationalism. Rabindranath’s conviction about the salience of religion and righteous rulership in forging the unity of a nation – which was first worked out by him in the context of colonial India – thus received a new ceremonious signification here, as it resonated with the monarchically-framed nationalism of the Siamese ruling classes.

In a comparable way, Rabindranath Tagore’s tour of Iran in 1932 demonstrated the intersections between Iran’s royally-oriented nationalism and Indian nationalist perspectives about the nexus of monarchy and nationbuilding. After becoming the Shah of Iran in 1925 (replacing the Qajar regime), Reza Shah Pahlavi sought to aggressively forge a reformist modern nation-state. He aimed to reduce Western imperial influence over his country, as well as to promote social reforms, civil rights (including for women and minorities), economic development and modern education. In the process, he courted Zoroastrian merchants of Iran and India, hoping to harness their powerful transnational networks of capital. The state also increasingly drew upon preIslamic Iranian monarchic history to justify this royal nationalism. In this milieu, Reza Shah invited Rabindranath to visit Iran. As the historian Afshin Marashi observes: ‘Tagore’s presence at Persepolis, as with the symbolism throughout his journey to Iran, bestowed the moral authority of Indo-Iranian civilization onto the Iranian nation-state.’399

During their Iran visit, Rabindranath and his entourage visited Bushehr, Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran and Persepolis, and interacted extensively with Iranian officials, politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, merchants and representatives of local Zoroastrian and Armenian communities. Rabindranath was awed by the architectural achievements of past Iranian rulers: he was especially impressed by the Achaemenid capital complex of Persepolis which the Pahlavi monarchy was transforming into an archaeological centrepiece of Iranian national identity. He felt that Reza Shah’s efforts to end sectarian conflicts in Iran and to protect the rights of minorities like Zoroastrians, Baha’is and Armenians, should serve as inspiration for India, which was racked by violence between Hindus and Muslims. In speeches in Iran and in writings aimed at Indian audiences, Rabindranath cast the Shah as a liberator of Iran from Qajar misadministration and from Western (especially British) economic domination and political imperialism. Further, and drawing on his decadesold fascination for monotheistic national rulership, he placed Pahlavi rule within a longer genealogy. Rabindranath admired Zarathustra for developing

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monotheism in ancient Iran, regarded his supreme deity Ahura Mazda as similar to the Vedic Indian god Varuna and thought that the Iranian prophet resembled the Indian Krishna in being descended from, as well as drawing his initial followers from, the kingly caste. For Rabindranath, there was a regal flavour to ancient Iranian and Indian ethics and monotheism. As he noted in a lecture at Oxford in 1930, Zarathustra’s mission was to protect the ‘Kshathra, the kingdom of righteousness’ from evil. On this monotheistic foundation, the national unity of Iran had supposedly been achieved under successive dynasties of Achaemenids, Sassanids and Safavids. The poet singled out the Achaemenid monarch Cyrus and the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas for their pursuit of justice and religious tolerance.400

For Rabindranath, the Iranian nation owed its unity to the twin pillars of monotheism and monarchy: ‘From the very beginning of history, the simple worship of one God (ekadevatar saral pujapaddhati) has undoubtedly helped the Persian nation to achieve unity and power.’401 Allied to this was a reformist monarchy which was ultimately an expression of the popular will of the nation. Deeply churned by the grandeur of Persepolis and by Shah Abbas’s monuments in Isfahan, Rabindranath remarked that in traditional societies, and especially in Iran, ‘a powerful man was the representative of all the common people (sarvasadharaner pratinidhi)’; ‘a lord of men (ganapati) would unite the powers of all human beings in himself and would manifest (prakasha) the common people through his own self.’ Through righteous kings, commoners found ‘fulfilment’ (sarthakata) and ‘happiness’; ‘all human beings were expressed (abhivyakta) through one human being’.402 This metaphysics of representation, in which the people were manifested and made great through their monotheistic and liberal ruler, historicised, ethicalised and obliquely justified the Pahlavi monarchy too. To Rabindranath, Reza Shah’s kingship was a similar expression of popular will. On meeting the monarch, he felt: ‘He [the Shah] had neither a dynastic right to the throne, nor the claim of aristocracy; but the moment he sat on the royal throne, his position in the hearts of the subjects (prajar hrdaye) was immediately assured.’403 The poet also invoked a strand of Bengali thinking which posited ‘Asian’ ideals of personal and loving rulership against ‘mechanical’ Western state power. Addressing the Isfahan Municipality in 1932, he described Reza Shah as embodying ‘the tradition of the East’ where ‘the Emperors represented the humanity of their nation and accepted their duty to establish communication with foreign lands’,

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in contrast to which stood the ‘modern statesman at the head of the political machinery’, who ‘has very little concern for culture’. In this vein, the Shah had begun ‘a glorious renewal’ and ‘renascence’ in Iran, which would ‘spread all over Asia’, disseminating ‘the message of the East, the message of freedom and love which comprehends the welfare of all races and peoples’.404 In a telegram he sent to the Shah after leaving Iran, he unhesitatingly acclaimed victory to Iran and to its monarch.405

Many other Bengalis too idealised the Shah as an exemplary nation-builder. Nazrul Islam described him as instrumental in the ‘awakening’ of the ‘destroyed land of Iran’, and as a model for Indian Muslims.406 A Calcutta-based Muslim newspaper noted in 1926: When the country is not yet fit for a democratic form of government, the only alternative is that there should be a powerful and resolute patriot to govern it. Ibn Saud has only followed the footsteps of Riza Khan of Persia and it is inconceivable that Riza Khan’s Kingship should be questioned.407

Meanwhile, prominent Bengali Hindu intellectuals saw the Pahlavi monarchy as the heir of an ancient Indo-Iranian civilization. Among them was Kalidas Nag, who went as Cultural Adviser with the first delegation from independent India to Iran in 1950, and interacted with Princess Shams Pahlavi, a daughter of Reza Shah Pahlavi, as well as with various Iranian politicians and intellectuals. This was a period of growing bonhomie between the two states; a friendship treaty was signed in 1950, establishing diplomatic relations. For many of the Indian actors involved, there was a keen sensibility about dense historical links, as well as a sense of shared resentment against Western hegemony. Nag was himself enamoured of Achaemenid, Sassanid and Safavid history. On seeing the Naqsh-e Rustam relief – after earlier ‘paying […] homage to the tombs of Darius I and his successors’ – he exulted in the victory of the Sassanid ruler Shapur I over the Roman emperor Valerian. Nag saw here depicted in visceral grandeur the ‘historic triumph of Asia over the Roman West’.408 Later, in 1966, at the World Congress of Iranologists at Tehran, Suniti Kumar Chatterji described Iran, and behind it Indo-Iranian culture, as the first progenitor of monotheistic principles. For Chatterji, it was the Indo-Iranian principle of rta/arta/asha or ‘truth’ which had found political expression in the Achaemenid monarchy, in Iranian Sufi idealisation of haqq, in Gandhi’s association of truth with divinity, and in ‘Free India’s national motto – satyam

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eva jayate, Truth alone triumphs’. Chatterji not only praised the ancient Iranian monarchy, grounding it in a supposed millennia-old bond of monotheism and truth, but also implicitly legitimated the contemporary Pahlavi monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose title (adopted in 1965), he noted, was ‘Arya-mehr […], ‘the Friend of the Aryans’ or ‘the Sun of the Aryan People’’. For Chatterji, even modern democracies appeared somewhat pale when juxtaposed with this racially-framed ‘Aryan’ monarchy: democracies were often ‘nothing but a camouflage […] covering up closely-knit power-loving tyranny of a party of oligarchs with slogans of high-sounding idealism’. Chatterji’s acclamation at Tehran of what he called ‘Iranianism’ – ‘Iran-manish zinda bad’ – was thus an acclamation of the Pahlavi monarchy too, as the latter reinterpreted Iranian history to justify its ruthless drive for power.409 But it also drew on a decades-long Bengali admiration for the Iranian monarchy as a nation-building institution, the alleged heir of a monotheistic Indo-Iranian political theology. Iraq offers another instance of an Asian monarchy which inspired prominent Indian intellectuals. Carved out with British help from the debris of the Ottoman Empire, the Hashemite monarchy gradually sought to mould an Arab, and occasionally even a pan-Asian, nationalist politics. This political context helps explain King Faisal I’s invitation to Rabindranath to visit Iraq in 1932. In meetings in Iraq, Rabindranath in turn lauded the king as ‘one of the modern rulers of men and shapers of history,’ as the symbol of ‘a renascent Asia’ and the head of an ‘old nation […] born anew’. The fact that the king had invited the poet demonstrated to Rabindranath how Asian monarchs could still rise above the ‘utilitarian urgency of this machine-driven age’. Simultaneously, the poet urged Iraqis to help promote friendship between Hindus and Muslims in India. Rabindranath was also welcomed at Baghdad by Ali bin Hussein, Faisal’s brother and former king of the Hejaz.410 In part, Rabindranath’s appreciation of the Iraqi monarch was framed through European Orientalism-inflected romantic tropes about Arab simplicity and heroism. In his memoir about the tour, the poet invoked Lawrence of Arabia to suggest that ‘among the great people of Arabia, King Faisal’s place is just after Muhammad and Saladin. I have seen the simple form of this greatness in his easy hospitality, and I have honoured (abhivadan) him.’411 Nazrul Islam was similarly ecstatic about the king, describing Faisal in Zulfiqar (1932) as the awakener of Iraq, ‘a new [Caliph] Harun al-Rashid’ whom Indian Muslims should emulate.412 The journal Pravasi described

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the king as a great Arab ruler, and ‘leader’ (nayaka) of ‘the new renaissance (punarjagarana) which Asia is now experiencing’.413 The Calcutta newspaper Azad praised Ghazi, successor of Faisal I, for promoting pan-Arab unity and political regeneration.414 This positive appraisal of the Iraqi monarchy among Indian political classes and literati undoubtedly facilitated the eventual growth of political friendship between the two countries. Soon after independence, India established diplomatic ties and cultural exchanges with Iraq. When Kalidas Nag, as part of a broader Indian delegation, visited Iraq in 1950, and went inside a memorial to Faisal I, he was ‘thrilled to discover that the authorities had preserved in the hall a big-size photograph, showing King Faisal, Rabindranath, Sm. Pratima Devi and Kedarnath Chatterjee (Editor, ‘Modern Review’) – among some members of the royal household.’415 In general, Nag was effusive in praise of the monarchy, which he saw as an agent of nationalist modernity: ‘Modern Iraq developed under the paternal care of Emir Faisal’.416 Nag equally admired ‘the enlightened and progressive Prince Regent – H.R.H. the Amir Abdul Illah’.417 In praising interwar Asian kingships, Bengali intellectuals often glossed over the opposition offered by many of their subjects to these rulers. An exception to this trend is visible in Syed Mujtaba Ali’s description of Amanullah Khan’s regime in Afghanistan. Amanullah had waged the Third Anglo-Afghan War against the British in 1919, and managed to wrest a substantial amount of political autonomy for his country, taking advantage of the unrest in India in the late 1910s and early 1920s, as well as of the onset of the Russian Revolution. To many Indians, he became an inspiring icon; in the late 1910s, some Indian Muslims even migrated to his country to protest against British rule over India. In a short story he wrote while stationed as a soldier in Karachi (and which was published in 1919), Nazrul Islam described an Afghan who deserted the British army to join Amanullah’s forces and laid down his life as a ‘martyr’ (shahid) for the ruler and for his country, dying in the Emir’s company. The story embodied the poet’s own transformation from a colonial soldier to an anticolonial militant; more broadly, it captured the spirit of an age which valourised autonomous kingship over colonial heteronomy.418 Later, when Amanullah visited India in 1927, Nazrul published a welcome poem, describing him as a ‘king of kings’ (shahanshah) and ‘a king of the heart’s joy’ (buker khushir badshah). But this was no simple praise of kingship: Nazrul avowed that the ‘throne of a king’ was ‘an insult to the human race’ as well as against Islamic principles.

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But Amanullah, he felt, deserved special admiration for freeing his nation and for protecting the rights of the minority Hindus.419 The Communist leader Muzaffar Ahmad too praised the king for his ‘honourable’ politics.420

Mujtaba Ali, a Bengali intellectual who served from 1927 to 1929 as a professor in Kabul, also deeply admired Amanullah for his reforms, including the spread of modern education among Afghan men and women. Drawing on European concepts of church-state conflict, he valourised the king’s struggle against the conservative ulama. However, he also criticised the ruler for the superficial and elitist nature of the Afghan modernising project. Ali felt that Amanullah often stressed excessively on external markers of modernity, such as the adoption of Western dress, cinema and luxuries and failed to take the masses, and especially the poor, into partnership in his reforms. This exclusion of public opinion, he felt, was ultimately responsible for the erosion of the king’s popularity, contributing – together with conservative hostility to his reforms – to his overthrow in 1929.421 More broadly, Ali identified an intrinsic contradiction in the reform projects adopted by West Asian monarchies, including those of Egypt (where he studied at Al-Azhar University from 1934 to 1935), Jordan, Iraq, Iran and even Saudi Arabia. These rulers, he thought, fostered some amount of nationalist political awakening. But ultimately, for Ali, the monarchic route to modern nation-construction was fatally compromised. Divorced from popular opinion, driven by undemocratic authoritarianism, and jealous of each other, the rulers sooner or later became stooges of British colonial, or after the Second World War, increasingly American neo-colonial, hegemony in the Middle-East, helping their imperial masters to establish control over the oil resources and geopolitics of the region.422

I end this section with Radhabinod Pal, whose celebrated intervention in the domain of international law is inseparable from his critique of divine rulership and state sovereignty.423 In a famous dissenting judgment at the Tokyo Trial (1946–48), he argued that the Japanese political-military leadership could not be seen as exclusively responsible for precipitating the Second World War in Asia. As I have elsewhere shown in detail, Pal’s main contention was that structures of sovereignty as such were responsible for engendering violence. Behind these structures, he saw the operation of sacralised ideas of divine rulership, which legitimated different forms of hierarchical authority and violence. Pal argued that in early modern and modern times, ideas of divine sovereignty – and especially the Christian concept of a kingly and despotic lawgiver God – had

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been secularised to form the basis of notions and practices of state sovereignty: when these acted in conjunction with militarised nationalism, the result was the massive eruption of imperial violence. Japan had practised such violence, he felt, only in reaction to the prior colonial violence of Western powers in Asia. Moreover, he thought that the Allied Powers, through the Tokyo Trial, were trying to invoke quasi-theological conceptions – for example of Christian natural law – in order to justify the imposition of their neo-imperial sovereignty over Japan in the name of international (criminal) justice. Ironically, of course, Pal’s dissent led him to virtually exculpate the Japanese leadership of their role in war crimes; a critique of (Western) sovereignty thus became complicit with a championing of (non-Western/Asian/Japanese) sovereignty and sovereign violence.424 In criticising European theorists on sovereignty in a 1958 book on legal history, Pal blamed: that sanctification of power politics which is symbolized by the words ‘State’ and ‘Sovereignty’. They were invented by the apologists of absolute power, by men like Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius and Spinoza, the object being to provide a universal value and appeal for the prince’s efforts to extend and consolidate his realm.425

Pal felt that modern ideas of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ had transformed, rather than negated, this model of absolutist sovereignty: Rousseau ‘replaced the notion of the state, a notion which had well nigh merged into that of the ruler, by the notion of the nation, and insisted upon the absoluteness of the aim of the state’. However, ‘a minority at the top of the social scale’ still monopolised power while ‘the mass merely obey’ and ‘become unhappy’ since there is ‘widespread suffering’.426 Pal suggested that certain ancient Indian thinkers like Manu advocated analogous regimes of absolutist sovereignty, based on practices of royal domination, caste violence and gender hierarchy. Simultaneously however, Pal located in Vedic texts an ethical horizon of rta, which could serve as a moral law template and guide the flexible and changing world of human/social laws. He hoped that the violences of sovereignty or (in Indic terminology) kshatra could thereby be circumscribed and transcended. Pal ultimately reposed faith in the possibility of transforming the world through ethically-motivated, and resolutely democratising, transnational legal and political encounters and activism. A critique of monarchic and monotheistic rulership and sovereignty shaped the core of this vision.427

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 263

3.12 Conclusion In a famous essay published anonymously in the journal The Modern Review in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru compared himself to ‘some triumphant Caesar’, as someone with ‘all the makings of a dictator’. Nehru feared Indians succumbing to such ‘Caesarism’, since even a ‘benevolent and efficient despotism’ would harm India, delaying ‘the emancipation of her people’. Hence, he suggested that he should not be elected a third time to the office of the President of the Congress: ‘We want no Caesars.’428 Written at a time when the Congress was aspiring for hegemony in India and Nazism and Fascism were enjoying their dark heyday in Europe, Nehru’s confession demonstrates both the traction of Caesarism in Indian nationalist circles, as well as a simultaneous reluctance to instantiate such a Caesarist rule.

I would argue that the icon of Nehru Caesar captures a basic Indian ambiguity towards powerful rulership, a schizophrenia about the sovereign figure. On the one hand, in order to fight against colonial economic, political and cultural domination, many Indian nationalists felt that a strong executive state, hinged on a potent sovereign figure, was necessary. Their relatively elite social location made many of these Indian actors desire a welfare state, which would govern the people in a paternalist mode, replicating many of the colonial state’s apparatuses of, and assumptions about, authority. The discursive unity provided by concepts of a singular God or by invocations of mythical and historical rulers supported such enunciations. These concepts of patriotic sovereign rulership were often projected as ‘modern’ (adhunika); indeed as necessary for national progress, civilization and welfare (unnati, sabhyata, hita). European (British, German, Italian) and Asian (Japanese, West Asian, South-East Asian) models of rulership served as inspiration for Indians to re-imagine their own sovereign icons. New pan-Asian discourses were forged through such intersections. The organized state violence underpinning European (and Japanese) racialised imperialism however made many Indians ultimately wary of the idea of a powerful and centralised state sovereignty, and critical towards the monistic political theology that allegedly underwrote it. European-origin constitutionalist, democratic and socialist ideas, as well as reinterpretations of South Asian political ethics, went into the making of novel anti-colonial grammars. Collectivised and democratised idioms of divine and human

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rulership found a welcome home in these alternate visions. The need to negotiate the broader population in an age of increasing mass (peasant and working-class) insurgency and expanding electorates, circumscribed the possibilities of an actual national monarchy, as did the endemic social diversity and factional tensions among the Western-educated South Asian middle classes. The failed coronation of Surendranath Banerjea, bitterly mocked as ‘Surendra Caesar’ by Aurobindo Ghose, offers a privileged microcosm for studying some of these contradictions. The dream of a powerful ruler-politician however re-surfaced in varying strands of nationalist intellection across the late colonial era and beyond. Given these ambivalences among Westerneducated Indian middle classes about a strong centralised executive, it was perhaps collectivist and democratic visions of authority at subaltern levels which played a critical, if not determining, role in precluding the emergence of a postcolonial Caesar in independent India. Between the 1960s and 1980s, single-party Congress hegemony gradually broke down in India. Lower caste and socialist politics, driven particularly by peasant communities, enabled this act of dismantling. The next chapter examines the notions of collectivised rulership which had a constitutive role to play in the emergence of many of these peasant movements.

Endnotes 1 Inden, Imagining India, 188. 2

3 4

5 6 7

On the subalternity of the Bengali middle classes, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 7, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 40–68. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dilli Darbar’ (1877), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 3, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1983, 1110–11.

D. L. Roy, ‘Sita’ (1908), in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 2, Calcutta: Saksharata Prakashan, Pashchimavanga Niraksharata Durikarana Samiti, 1975, 234; ‘Chandragupta’ (1911), in ibid., 373. D. L. Roy (1863–1913) was a nationalist playwright from Bengal. For example, RNPB 1907: Sandhya, 10 January, Daily Hitavadi, 8 February and Bangavasi, 20 July. Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 6, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1993, 255.

Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 4, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1987, 347–48.

8 Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 6, 255–57. 9

On acclamation, see: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 265 Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958 (1946); Agamben, Kingdom.

10 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Dharmatattva’, in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1994, 555–58. 11 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’, in ibid., 828.

12 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’, in ibid., 353–524.

13 Romesh Chunder Dutt, Three Years in Europe 1868 to 1871, with an Account of Subsequent Visits to Europe in 1886 and 1893, Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri and Co., 1896, 302.

14 Ibid., 285.

15 Vivekananda, ‘Parivrajaka’, in Vani o Rachana, vol. 6, 99.

16 Vivekananda, ‘Vartamana Bharata’ (1898–1900), in ibid., 188.

17 Mahadev Govind Ranade, Rise of the Maratha Power, Bombay: Punalekar and Co., 1900, iv, 8, 13–14, 16. 18 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ‘Honest Swadeshi’ (1906) in Writings and Speeches, 52–54. 19 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ‘Home Rule’ (1917), in ibid., 254–55.

20 Lajpat Rai, The Problem of National Education in India, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920, 131, 147. 21

On the Oraons, see Ranajit Das Gupta, ‘Oraon Labour Agitation: Duars in Jalpaiguri District, 1915–16’, Economic and Political Weekly 24(39) 1989: 2197–202; Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a World: The Tana Bhagat Movement, 1914–1919’, Studies in History 15(1) 1999: 1–41. On the Indian nationalist projects, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan, 2001 (1983), 147–49; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

22 Abul Mansur Ahmed, Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panchash Bachhar, Dhaka: Khoshroj Kitab Mahal, 2010 (1969), 20–21. Ahmed (1898–1979) played an important role in Bengali Muslim politics and later helped found the Awami League in East Pakistan. 23 Ramakanta Ray, ‘Japanpravasir Patra’, in Pravasi, 1(4) 1308 BS (1901-02): 160–63. 24 Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, London: John Murray, 1903, 215–21. Okakura (1862–1913) was a Japanese panAsianist and nationalist intellectual.

25 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Svadeshi Samaj’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 49–50, 52–53, 55; quote from 53.

26 Steven Marks, ‘“Bravo, Brave Tiger of the East!”: The War and the Rise of Nationalism in British Egypt and India’, in The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, vol. 1, edited by John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff and Shinji Yokote, Leiden: Brill, 2005, 609–28; Gita Dharampal-Frick, ‘Der russisch-japanische Krieg und die indische Nationalbewegung’, in Der Russisch-Japanische Krieg 1904/05. Anbruch einer neuen Zeit?, edited by M. H. Sprotte, W. Seifert and H.-D. Löwe, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007, 259–75. 27 Gopal Krishna Gokhale, ‘Benares Congress Presidential Address’ (1905), in Speeches

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28 Gokhale, ‘Our Political Situation’ (1904), in ibid., 1069.

29 Gokhale, ‘The Elementary Education Bill’ (1912), in ibid., 782.

30 Nile Green, ‘Shared Infrastructures, Informational Asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c. 1890–1930’, Journal of Global History 8(3) 2013: 414–35; Nile Green, ‘Anti-Colonial Japanophilia and the Constraints of an Islamic Japanology: Information and Affect in the Indian Encounter with Japan’, South Asian History and Culture 4(3) 2013: 291–313.

31 Mahatma Gandhi, ‘The Rise of Japan’, in Indian Opinion, 2 September 1905, in CWMG vol. 5, Delhi: Government of India, 1961, 57–58. Okuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) served twice as Prime Minister of Japan (1898, 1914–16). Kaneko Kentaro (1853–1942) was a Japanese politician and diplomat. 32 CWMG vol. 4, Delhi: Government of India, 1960, 466–68; vol. 5, 115, 136–37, 278–79, 328; vol. 6, 279, 457.

33 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘Shivaji-Utsava o Bhavanimurti’, in Vangadarshana (Navaparyaya), 6(6) 1313 BS (1906-07): 296–305.

34 Aurobindo Ghose, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vols. 6 and 7, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2002, 86. 35 Ibid., 1093–95, 1103.

36 Ibid., 223, 227, 232, 265–67, 308–9, 455, 722; quotes from 232 and 265.

37 Aurobindo Ghose, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 8, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997, 144. 38 Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 401.

39 Manmathanath Ghosh, Sachitra Navya Japan, Calcutta: Manmathanath Ghosh, 1915, 21. 40 Ibid., 82–83, 121.

41 Sartori, Bengal. I am also indebted to conversations with Sartori for this part of my argument.

42 The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, vol. 5, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2012, 242– 43, 335, 338. 43

Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Japan-yatri’ (1919), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 12, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989, 189–90; Prasanta Kumar Paul, Ravijivani, vol. 7, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1997, 176–99, 244–46; Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and his Critics in Japan, China, and India, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.

44 This reading is based on discussions on Japan scattered throughout The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1–100, Government of India. For a strong statement against Japan, see Mahatma Gandhi, ‘To Every Japanese’ (1942), in CWMG vol. 76, Delhi: Government of India, 1979, 309–12. 45 Ranade, Maratha Power, 38. 46 Deshpande, Creative Pasts.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 267 47 Philip Constable, ‘The Marginalization of a Dalit Martial Race in Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century Western India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 60(2) 2001: 439–78.

48 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, Folk 26, 1984: 25–49; Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990; Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; Matthew Groves, ‘Law, Religion and Public Order in Colonial India: Contextualising the 1887 Allahabad High Court Case on ‘Sacred’ Cows’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 33(1) 2010: 87–121.

49 Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Raivataka’ (1887), in Navinachandrer Granthavali, vol. 1, Calcutta: Ashvinikumar Haldar, 1904, 757–1055; ‘Kurukshetra’ (1893) and ‘Prabhas’ (1897), in Navinachandrer Granthavali, vol. 2, Calcutta: Ashvinikumar Haldar, 1904, 1061–512. Quoted phrases in italics: ‘Raivataka’, 795, 1006–7. Nabinchandra, a member of the high-caste (but non-Brahmin) Baidya community of Bengal, wished to get the sacred thread for Baidyas, without which he thought their Aryan identity would not be established. This involved him in conflict with local elites who denied that Baidyas could take the sacred thread (the privilege being reserved for Brahmins). See Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Amar Jiban’ in Shantikumar Dasgupta and Haribandhu Mukhati (eds.), Navinachandra Rachanavali, vol. 2, Calcutta: Dattachaudhuri, 1975, 43–45 and 319–21. 50 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006; Dirks, Castes.

51 Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Raivataka’, 865, 942, 997–1006, ‘Kurukshetra’ and ‘Prabhas’, 1066, 1103, 1163–64, 1168, 1204, 1214, 1216, 1244, 1287, 1319, 1338, 1368, 1437, 1449, 1489–90. 52 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’, in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 353–524. 53 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’, in ibid., 828.

54 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2: ‘Ingrajstotra’ in ‘Lokarahasya’ (1874, 1888), 8–9; ‘Babu’ in ‘Lokarahasya’, 9–11; ‘Bangalir Manushyatva’ in ‘Kamalakanta’ (1885), 85; ‘Muchiram Gurer Jivanacharita’ (1880), 101–13. 55 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Hanumadbabu Samvad’ in ‘Lokarahasya’ in ibid., 34–36.

56 Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. 57 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Devatattva Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 707–50; quote from 743.

o

Hindudharma’,

in

58 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ (1919), in Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 310–11. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Trinity Hall, on 12 Aug 2020 at 12:39:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316711187.004

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59 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shivaji-Utsava’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 2, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1982, 708–12. 60 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Vira Guru’ (1885), ‘Sikh-svadhinata’ (1885), ‘Aitihasika Chitra’ (1898), and ‘Shivaji o Guru Govindasimha’ (1910), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 15, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1994, 505–10, 515–19, 523–28.

61 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Aitihasika Chitra’, in ibid., 515. 62 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Raja Ramamohana Rayer Smaranartha Sabhay 1291 saler 5 Maghe City College Grhe Pathita’ (1885), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989, 219–25; also ‘14 Pausha 1340. RamamohanaMrtyu-Shatavarshikite Sabhapatir Abhibhashana’ (1934), and ‘RamamohanaMrtyu-Shatavarshikir Shesha Vaktrta’ (1934), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 191–98. 63 For Rammohun’s writings, see Ramamohana Rachanavali, Calcutta: Haraf, 1973; The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, Allahabad: The Panini Office, 1906. 64 Rammohun Roy, ‘Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India, and of the General Character and Condition of its Native Inhabitants, as Submitted in Evidence to the Authorities in England’ (1832), in English Rammohun, 232–33. 65 Rabindranath Tagore’s article on Rammohun (1915), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 232. 66 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Magha 1311. Maharshir Adyakrtya Upalakshe Prarthana’ (1905), in ibid., 204–7. 67 Rabindranath Tagore’s article on Vidyasagar (1898), in ibid., 187. 68 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Svadeshi Samaj’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 43–60. 69 Ibid., 53 70 Ibid., 55. 71 Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 16, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 2001, 1183– 84. Gooroodass Banerjee (1844–1918) was an educationist; he became the first Indian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1890, and also served as a judge in the Calcutta High Court. 72 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Avastha o Vyavastha’, 1905, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 97–101. 73 Ibid., 100 74 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Deshanayaka’, Vangadarshana (Navaparyaya) 6(2) 1313 BS (1906-07): 49–64; Rabindranath used the English words ‘petition’, ‘protest’ and ‘debating society’ in his speech. Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925) was a Moderate Indian nationalist politician from Bengal. 75 Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 16, 1186–89. 76 Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 4, 347–48. 77 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dakghar’ (1912), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, 717–35. 78 C. F. Andrews (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926, 173.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 269 79 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Shivaji, Jaysingh’ (1910 or shortly before), in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 1, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2003, 483. 80 Ibid., 485. 81 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Early Indian Polity’ (1908), in Complete Aurobindo, vols. 6 and 7, 945–46. 82 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘New Lamps for Old’ (1893-94) in ibid., 40–41.

83 Miriam Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar, Chichester: Blackwell, 2009, 410–40; Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. 84 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Pherozshahi at Surat’ (1907), in Complete Aurobindo, vols. 6 and 7, 253–56. 85 Ibid., 253.

86 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji’ (1907), in Girisharachanavali, vol. 3, Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1972, 437–38. 87 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Ashoka’, in ibid., 583, 591. 88 Nivedita, ‘Introduction’, in Okakura, Ideals, xx. 89 Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 298–99. 90 See later in this chapter.

91 Nivedita, ‘Obedience and Discipline’, in Complete Nivedita, vol. 5, 110–13.

92 The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, vol. 3, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2014, 448, 494–95, 504; vol. 4, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2010, 296, 348; vol. 5, 65–68, 89, 199–200, 334–35. 93 Nivedita, ‘The Call to Nationality’, in Complete Nivedita, vol. 4, 295–96.

94 D. L. Roy, ‘Tarabai’, in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 1, Calcutta: Saksharata Prakashan, Pashchimavanga Niraksharata Durikarana Samiti, 1973, 397. 95

D. L. Roy, ‘Sita’ (1908), in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 2, 233–36; ‘Chandragupta’ (1911), in ibid., 402–3, 419, 423, 428-29.

96 Kaikobad, Mahashmashana, Dhaka: Student Ways, 2006. Kaikobad (1857–1951) was a Bengali Muslim litterateur.

97 Mir Mosharraf Hossain, Vishada Sindhu, Calcutta: Haraf Prakashani, 2005, 32, 38–39, 281–83. Hossain (1847–1912) was the most celebrated Bengali Muslim litterateur of the late-nineteenth century. 98 Ibid., 163–64.

99 On monotheistisation in South Asian Islam, see: Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; Eaton, Rise of Islam; Amit Dey, The Image of the Prophet in Bengali Muslim Piety, 1850–1947, Kolkata: Readers Service, 2006; Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella (eds.), Islamic Reform in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 100 See Chapter 5 for the bearing of this on the Khilafat movement.

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101 Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1800–1910, Western Impact: Indian Response, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005; A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956, Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2006.

102 Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, ‘Greece’, in Rosinka Chaudhuri (ed.), Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, 119. Derozio (1809–31) was a poet, teacher and liberal-radical intellectual in Bengal.

103 Alexander Riddiford, Madly After the Muses: Bengali Poet Michael Madhusudan Datta and His Reception of the Graeco-Roman Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–73) was a Bengali poet. 104 D. L. Roy, ‘Mewar Patan’, in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 2, especially 283–84, 291.

105 Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Dhatridevata’ in Tarashankara Rachanavali, vol. 1, Calcutta: Mitra o Ghosh, 2000, 67–68. Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971) was a Bengali novelist. 106 Abanindranath Tagore, Rajkahini, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1991, 14, 19. Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) was a Bengali artist and writer. 107 Swarnakumari Devi, Mibarraj, Calcutta: Kantik Press, 1909. Swarnakumari Devi (1855-1932) was a novelist and a pioneer female author in Bengali.

108 See, for example, Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal records: ‘Dramas-Jatras-Plays-Procedure in Reporting the Performances of’, Sl. No. 29/1913, File No. 517/1913; ‘Books -- Entitled “Jhansir Rani”, “Ayodhyar Begam”, “Maharaj Nandakumar”, “Tomkakar Kirti”’, Sl. No. 7/1916, File No. 422/1916; ‘List of Plays Proscribed under the Dramatic Performance Act and Indian Press Act, 1910’, Sl. No. 23/1917, File No. 758/1917; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List records: ‘Application of the Dramatic Performances Act XIX of 1876 to Seditious Plays’, 129/1910, 121 (1-8)/1910, 129 (9-11)/1910; ‘Proposed Prohibition of the Performance of a Play called Protapaditya’, K.W. 129/1910; ‘Application of the Dramatic Performances Act XIX of 1876 to Seditious Plays’, 121/1911, 121 (1-4)/1911; ‘Orders on the Subject of the Prohibition of the Performance of Objectionable Plays’, 47/1912, 47/1912 (1), 47/1912 (2); ‘Prohibition of the Performance of Objectionable Plays: Amalgamation of the Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam Orders’, 47/1912 (3-4); ‘Prohibition of the Performance of Objectionable Plays’, 109/1913 (1-4), 109/1913 (5-8);’ ‘Prohibition of the Performance of the Objectionable Plays Mewar Pathan and Prithiraj’, 154/1913 (1-6); ‘Synopsis of a Play called “Prithiraj”’, 154/1913 K.W.; ‘Case of a Play Entitled “Harish Chandra Natak”’, 222/1916 (1-9), 222/1916 (1011), 222/1916 (12-13), 222/1916 K.W.; ‘An Objectionable Drama entitled “Rana Pratap Singh” with 1 Copy of the Bengali Book Entitled “Rana Pratap Singh” by D. L. Roy’, 494/1916. 109 Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

110 See, for example, the pamphlets in Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal records: Sl. No. 15/1910, File No. 1318B/1910; Sl. No. 25/1910, File No. v/105/1910; Sl. No. 38/1910, File No. 1318/1910; Sl. No.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 271 5/1913, File No. 663/1913; Sl. No. 37/1913, File No. 512/1913; Sl. No. 56/1913, File No. 1340/1913, Sl. No. 16/1915, File No. 347/1915; Sl. No. 115/1916, File No. 2223/1916.

111 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960 (1899), 1210.

112 Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources), London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914, 116. Radhakumud Mookerji was a nationalist historian from Bengal. 113 Ibid., viii, xii. 114 Ibid., 88–89.

115 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Hindu Theory of International Relations’, The American Political Science Review 13(3) 1919: 409. Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949) was a Bengali social scientist. 116 Ibid. (‘imperial nationalism’ phrase in 410). 117 Ibid., 400. 118 Ibid.

119 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, Allahabad: Panini Office, 1937, 385, 579–80, 586–87, 640. On Formichi’s views, see Carlo Formichi, Salus Populi: Saggio di Scienza Politica, Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1908. 120 Aurobindo, ‘The Ideal of Human Unity’, in Complete Aurobindo, vol. 25, 306–8.

121 Krishan Kumar, ‘Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice?’, Theory and Society 39(2) 2010: 119–43. Curiously, Kumar also uses the phrase ‘imperial nationalism’.

122 Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, Bangalar Itihasa, vols. 1 and 2 (1914–17), Calcutta: Dey’s, 1998. Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay (1885–1930) was a Bengali archaeologist, historian and litterateur, remembered today mainly for his work on the Indus Valley Civilization. 123 K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar (1955), Madras: Oxford University Press, 1976. Nilakanta Sastri (1892–1975) was a Tamil historian, with significant writings on the history of southern India.

124 R. C. Majumdar (ed.), The History and Culture of the Indian People, vols. 1–11 (1951– 69), Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996–2003. 125 In Bengal, one paradigm-shifting volume was Niharranjan Ray, Bangalir Itihasa: Adi Parva (1949), Calcutta: Dey’s, 1993. 126 Deshpande, Creative Pasts; Béneï, Schooling Passions. 127 Saikia, Fragmented Memories.

128 In militant Hindu nationalist politics, Muslims are often effectively cast as heirs of Mughal ‘tyrants’ and therefore as an alien presence in the Indian nation. The destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 violently demonstrated this conflation of anti-Mughal historiography and anti-Muslim political consciousness.

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129 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947, London: Reaktion Books, 2007; Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion Books, 2004; Karline McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 130 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Dharmatattva’, in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 555.

131 See Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500–1900, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. Important examples of the Padmini legend, penned by Bengali nationalist authors, include Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s Padmini Upakhyan (1858), Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod’s Padmini (1906) and Abanindranath Tagore’s retelling in Rajkahini (1909).

132 Sangari and Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women; Chatterjee, Nation and Fragments; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995; Nancy L. Paxton, ‘Secrets of the Colonial Harem: Gender, Sexuality, and the Law in Kipling’s Novels’ in Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, edited by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, 139–62; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001; Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001; Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Indrani Sen, ‘‘Cruel, Oriental Despots’: Representations in Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Fiction, 1858– 1900,’ in Princely States, edited by Ernst and Pati, 30–48; Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 133 D. L. Roy, ‘Sita’, Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 2, 249. The playwright however does not give the last say to Vashishtha whose remark comes in a debate on the conflicting claims of love and royal duty. 134 D. L. Roy, ‘Chandragupta’, in ibid., 425.

135 D. L. Roy, ‘Durgadas’ (1906), in ibid., 2; ‘Rana Pratapasimha’ (1905), in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 1, 508–9.

136 For example, Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, 259. 137 Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 83–84. 138 Ibid.,154.

139 Consider, for example, the popularity of the Hindi film Jodhaa Akbar (2008): Goldie Osuri, ‘Secular Interventions/Hinduized Sovereignty: (Anti) Conversion and Religious Pluralism in “Jodhaa Akbar”’, Cultural Critique 81(1) 2012: 70–99. 140 Jijabai was the mother of the future king Shivaji; the Maratha queen Ahalyabai and the Bengali zamindar Bhavani (both from the eighteenth century) were alike

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 273 celebrated for their charitable works and welfare-oriented governance. On their valence in Indian nationalist discourses (until today), see, for example, Ranade, Maratha Power, 60–63; Mahendra Gupta, ‘Rani Bhavani’ (1942) in Natak Samagra, vol. 2 Calcutta: Eva Gupta Pani, 2010, 145–208; Kalyani Devaki Menon, ‘“We will become Jijabai”: Historical Tales of Hindu Nationalist Women in India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 64(1) 2005: 103–26; Sikata Banerjee, Make me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, 121–23.

141 Raziya Sultana was a thirteenth-century ruler of the Delhi Sultanate; Chand Bibi a sixteenth-century queen who fought against the Mughals; Lakshmibai of Jhansi battled against the British during the Rebellion of 1857. For invocations of these queens, see, for example, Jyotirindranath Tagore, Jhansir Rani (1903), Calcutta: Nabapatra, 1983; Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod, ‘Chand Bibi’ (1907) in Kshirod Granthavali, vol. 6, Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, n.d., 1–78; Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Jhansir Rani’ in Girisha Rachanavali, vol. 3, edited by Deviprasad Bhattacharya, 787–804; Mahendra Gupta, ‘Sultana Riziya’ in Natak Samagra, vol. 2, 701–67. My analysis here draws on Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Virangana in North Indian History, Myth and Popular Culture’ in Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History, edited by Alice Thorner and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Bombay: Orient Longman, 2000, 257–87. 142 Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 143 See the discussion on Bankimchandra’s Devi Chaudhurani (1884) later in this chapter. 144 Forbes, Women, 121–56; Durba Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s’, Gender and History 25(2) 2013: 355–75. 145 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, ‘Anguriya Binimaya’ in Bhudevarachanasambhara, 272– 331. 146 For example, in Bankimchandra’s novel Durgeshanandini, the Muslim Ayesha’s love for the Hindu Jagatsimha remained unfulfilled, unlike the easy romance between Jagatsimha and the Hindu Tilottama; in D. L. Roy’s play Chandragupta, the ‘tribal’ dark-skinned Chhaya loved Chandragupta in an unrequited manner: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Durgeshanandini’ (1865) in Bankimarachanasamgraha, Calcutta: Saksharata Prakashan, 1976; and D. L. Roy, ‘Chandragupta’ (1911), in Dvijendrarachanasamagra, vol. 2, 373–429. 147 Swarnakumari Devi, ‘Dipa Nirvana’ (1876) in Granthavali, Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, 1916, 45. 148 Swarnakumari Devi, Mibarraj, 3–4. 149 Abanindranath Tagore, Rajkahini, 41–42, 52–54. 150 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, 24–30. 151 Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, ‘Samajika Pravandha’ (1892), in Bhudevarachanasambhara, 115–20. 152 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Hindu Theory of the State’, Political Science Quarterly 36(1) 1921: 88.

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153 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 223. 154 Abanindranath Tagore, Rajkahini, 55. Naga-sannyasi also refers to communities of Hindu ascetics who exhibit a sort of sacralised nudity. 155 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Devi Chaudhurani’, in Bankimarachanasamgraha, 792–93. 156 Early Vaishnava articulations of love and suffering can be found in his ‘Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali’ (1877–83, 1884), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 1, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1980, 161–86. See also Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Duhkha’ (1908), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 14, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992, 618–25; quote from 625. He described God here as duhkher raja (621), the king of sorrows. 157 See his essays on Rammohun Roy (1896 and 1928), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 229–31, 234–36. 158 See, for example: Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Katha’ (1900), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 1, 719–90; ‘Naivedya’ (1901) in ibid., 955–1008; Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 4, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1987, 136, 146, 169, 176, 202–4, 207, 240– 41, 284, 307, 312, 323, 347–48. 159 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Chitrangada’ (1892) in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, 237–72 (quotes from 264); ‘Nrtyanatya Chitrangada’ (1936), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 6, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1985, 403-28. 160 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Prayashchitta’ (1909) in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, 618– 19. 161 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Naivedya’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 1, 986. 162 Ibid., 993–94. 163 Ibid., 986–87. 164 Ibid., 983–84.

165 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Kheya’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 2, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1982, 121–90. 166 Ibid., 128–29. 167 Ibid., 129–31. 168 Ibid., 134–36.

169 For example: Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Gitanjali’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 2, 255– 57.

170 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Gora’ (1910), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 7, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1985, 748, 830; ‘Ghare Baire’ (1916), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 8, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1986, 16, 46, 79–80, 112–13; ‘Char Adhyaya’ (1934), in ibid., 513. 171 On bhakti in colonial India, see also Guha, Dominance, 39–55.

172 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Krishnacharitra’. I thank Francesco Rosada of Heidelberg University for conversations on this relation between civic and romantic bonds.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 275 173 Sunity Academy, available at: http://coochbehar.nic.in/htmfiles/sunity/sunity_ home.html, accessed on 14 June 2015. 174 Sunity Devi, Autobiography, 212.

175 Ibid., 198; Chaki (ed.), Sunitidevi; Das, Suniti. 176 Sunity Devi, Autobiography, 199. 177 Ibid., 201.

178 Ibid., 135, 146–50, 152–54, 162, 195–98. 179 Ibid., 147–49.

180 Ibid., 204–5; Sunity Devi, The Beautiful Mogul Princesses, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1918; Sunity Devi, Nine Ideal Indian Women, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1919; Sunity Devi, Indian Fairy Tales, Calcutta: Art Press, 1922. These are only a select few of Sunity’s extensive writings. 181 Sunity Devi, Autobiography, 213. 182 Ibid., 180–82.

183 Sunity Devi, Mogul, 126–27.

184 Sunity Devi, Autobiography, 208. 185 Ibid., 128, 154. 186 Ibid., passim.

187 Complete Nivedita: vol. 1, 190-96, 461–504; vol. 2, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2012, 4, 33–34, 46–47, 56, 60–69, 90, 123–24, 354, 452, 494–95; vol. 3, 4, 58, 83, 91, 175–205; vol. 4, 240, 243, 248–49 (source of quoted term), 253, 307, 364, 387, 523, 529; vol. 5, 72–73. 188 Complete Nivedita, vol. 1, 191–92. 189 Complete Nivedita, vol. 2, 64–66.

190 This argument is evident across her writings, and particularly succinctly articulated in the essay ‘Lambs among Wolves: Missionaries in India’ (1901), in Complete Nivedita, vol. 4, 529. 191 Complete Nivedita, vol. 2, 64.

192 Barnita Bagchi, ‘Introduction’, in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005, x. 193 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, Calcutta: Viswakos Parisad, 2006, especially 17, 20, 25, 30–31, 33, 175–81, 410, 418–19. 194 Ibid., 429–32. 195 Ibid., 25.

196 Ibid., 483–96; quotes from 491, 494 and 496.

197 When a resident of Lady-land was asked her religion by the narrator, she replied: ‘Our religion is based on Love and Truth.’ (Ibid., 494–95). 198 Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 41–43. 199 Ibid., 54–55. 200 Ibid., 74.

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201 Ibid., 59–60. 202 Ibid., 104.

203 Ibid., 314–20. 204 Ibid., 169–70. 205 Ibid., 198.

206 Forbes, Women, 94.

207 Ibid. 208 Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 205. 209 Forbes, Women, 99–101. 210 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘The Sivaji Festival’ (1903) in Swadeshi and Swaraj, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1954, 84–87. 211 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘The Cult of Patriotism’ (1905), and ‘The Sivaji Festival’ (1902) in ibid., 12–14, 73–83. 212 Bipin Chandra Pal, Jailer Khata, Calcutta: Manmathanath Ghosh, 1909; Amar Rashtriya Matavad, Calcutta: Pal Brothers, 1922; Bengal Vaishnavism, Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1933; An Introduction to the Study of Hinduism, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1951 (1908); Navayuger Bangla (Dvitiya Amsha), Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1954; Swadeshi and Swaraj; Navayuger Bangla, Calcutta: Bipin Chandra Pal Institute, 1964; Sattar Batsar: Atmajivani, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1955; Rashtraniti, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1956; Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1958; The Soul of India: A Constructive Study of Indian Thoughts and Ideals, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1958 (1911); Charita-Chitra, Calcutta: Yugayatri, 1958; Yuger Manush Vijayakrishna, Calcutta: Bipin Chandra Pal Institute, 1965. 213 Pal, Soul of India, 118–20. 214 See, for example: Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, ‘Vedic Worship’ (1900), ‘Shrikrishnatattva’ (1904), ‘Snanayatra’ (1907), ‘Naradevata’ (1907), in The Writings of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (edited and annotated by Julius Lipner and George Gispert-Sauch), vol. 2, Bangalore: United Theological College, 2002, 286–87, 336–61, 446–47. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–1907), a Bengali convert to Catholicism, was an Indian nationalist intellectual and political leader. On Upadhyay, see Julius J. Lipner, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: The Life and Thought of a Revolutionary, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. 215 Pal, Jailer Khata; Soul of India, 194. 216 Nivedita, Complete Nivedita, vol. 3, 5, 9, 37, 52–56, 61–65, 69–71, 75–76, 82–84, 400–3; vol. 4, 314–15; vol. 5, 20–23, 331. 217 Anil Samarth, Shivaji and the Indian National Movement, Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 1975; Deshpande, Creative Pasts; Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 218 Sandhya, 22 May 1906, RNPB. 219 Pratinidhi, 18 July 1903, RNPB; Hitavadi, 24 July 1903, RNPB; The Bengalee, 6 June 1906, 6; The Bengalee, 7 June 1907, 3; Bande Mataram, 21 May 1907, 3; Bande Mataram, 30 May 1907, 3.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 277 220 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ‘The Political Situation’ (1906), in Writings and Speeches, 44– 45. 221 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ‘The Shivaji Festival’ (1907) in ibid., 76–77. 222 Ibid., 77. 223 Ibid., 80. 224 RNPB: Sri Sri Vishnu Priya o Ananda Bazar Patrika, 22 July 1903; Bangabhumi, 28 July 1903; Mihir o Sudhakar, 31 July 1903; Soltan, 8 June 1906.

225 Sarala Devi, Jivaner Jharapata, Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1958, 127–32. 226 Ibid., 125–43; The Bengalee, 15 October 1902, 3; Rangalay, 6 September 1903, RNPB; The Bengalee, 29 September 1906, 6. 227 Hitavadi, 3 February 1905, RNPB. 228 Pal, ‘The Sivaji Festival’, 87; RNPB: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 June 1906; Yugantar, 8 July 1906; Bande Mataram, 25 October 1907. 229 The Bengalee, 28 August 1906, 4. 230 The Bengalee, 30 August 1906, 4. 231 Ibid. 232 Bande Mataram, 1 September, 1906, in Complete Aurobindo, vols. 6 and 7, 127–28. 233 Bande Mataram, 3 September, 1906, in ibid., 129. 234 RNPB: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 September 1906; 4 October, 1906. 235 RNPB: The East, 6 September 1906. 236 Hindoo Patriot, 7 September 1906. 237 The Pioneer, 7 September 1906, 5; 9 September 1906, 6. 238 The Pioneer, 13 September 1906, 4 239 The Statesman, 20 September 1906, 4, 7. 240 The Bengalee, 2 September 1906, 3; 6 September 1906, 3; 8 September 1906, 3; 9 September 1906, 6; 11 September 1906, 6 . 241 For example, The Statesman, 22 September 1906, 5; The Bengalee, 29 September 1906, 6; The Bengalee, 30 September 1906, 4; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 October 1906. 242 The Times, 4 September 1906, 3. 243 The Times, 7 September 1906, 4; re-published in The Bengalee, 30 September 1906, 4. 244 The Times, 8 September 1906, 9. 245 The Times, 11 September 1906, 5; re-published in The Statesman, 29 September 1906, 5. 246 The Bengalee, 24 October 1906, 3. James Welldon (1854–-1937) served as Bishop of Calcutta (1898–1902). 247 The Times, 13 September 1906, 5. 248 The Times, 3 October 1906, 5. 249 The Times, 1 October 1906, 4. 250 The Times, 3 October 1906, 4.

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251 5 November 1906, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th series, vol. 164, 1906, 88; The Pioneer, 22 November 1906, 6. 252 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Dharmatattva’, in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 598. 253 Ibid., 587. 254 Ibid., 598. 255 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Samya’, in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 328–51.

256 Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, and Bankimarachanasamgraha. 257 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Devi Chaudhurani’, in Bankimarachanasamgraha, 764–68, 787, 800. 258 Ibid., 759, 767, 775–80, 787–93, 820. 259 Ibid., 818–19. 260 The controversial and shifting forms of the novel Anandamatha stemmed in part from these contradictions. 261 Vivekananda, ‘Prachya o Pashchatya’ (1899–1901) in Vani o Rachana, vol. 6, 154– 55. 262 Vivekananda, Letter to Mary Hale, 1 November 1896, in Complete Vivekananda, vol. 6, 381–82. 263 See, for example: Vivekananda, ‘Svami-shishya-samvada’ (the relevant passage dates to 1898), in Swami Vivekanander Vani o Rachana, vol. 9, Calcutta: Udbodhan Karyalaya, 1996, 103–4. 264 Vivekananda, ‘The Soul and God’, San Francisco, 23 March 1900, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1972, 489–502; ‘Maya and the Evolution of the Conception of God’, London, 20 October 1896, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 2, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1976, 105–17; ‘First Public Lecture in the East’, Colombo, 16 January 1897, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 3, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1973, 112–13; ‘The Mission of the Vedanta’, Kumbakonam, in ibid., 185–86. 265 Vivekananda, ‘India’s Message to the World’, n.d., in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 4, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1972, 310. 266 Vivekananda, ‘The Way to the Realisation of a Universal Religion’, Universalist Church, Pasadena, California, 28 January 1900, in Complete Vivekananda, vol. 2, 364. 267 Vivekananda, ‘The Freedom of the Soul’, London, 5 November 1896, in ibid., 19091. 268 Vivekananda, ‘Inspired Talks’, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 7, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2010, 29. 269 Ibid., 100. 270 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘Shivaji-Utsava o Bhavanimurti’, 296–305. 271 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘Indian Nationalism: Hindu Stand-Point’ (1913) in Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, 80. 272 Ibid., 78–79.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 279 273 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Krishnacharitra’ (1895), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 10, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989, 246–57. 274 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Aupanishad Brahma’ (1901), Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 14, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1992, 570. 275 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Dharmer Navayuga’ (1911), in ibid., 957–63; quote from 960. 276 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1917, 56. 277 Ibid., 15. 278 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘India and Japan’, in The Modern Review, August 1916, 216– 17. 279 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 50–60; Banerjee, ‘All This is Indeed Brahman’. 280 Dayanand Saraswati, An English Translation of the Satyarth Prakash, Lahore: Virjanand Press, 1908, 179–207. Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83) founded the Arya Samaj, the most famous Hindu reform movement of colonial northern India. 281 Mehta, Speeches of Mehta, 98-99; Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 164–65.

282 Syed Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam or the Life and Teachings of Mohammed, Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri and Co., 1902, 299. Syed Ameer Ali (1849–1928) was a jurist, scholar and political leader.

283 Syed Ameer Ali, A Short History of the Saracens, London: Macmillan and Co., 1899, 118. 284 Ibid., 402–6, 436. On Ameer Ali, see also Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 233–38.

285 See, for example, Syed Ahmed Khan, A Series of Essays on the Life of Mohammed, Delhi: Idarah-I Adabiyat-I Delli, date illegible (1870). My analysis draws on Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 232–33, 241–43. Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–98) was an intellectual and politician, who helped found the Aligarh movement. 286 Faisal Devji, ‘Apologetic Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History 4(1) 2007: 61–76. 287 Bhadra, Iman, 99–104. 288 Ibid., 232–99.

289 Hossain, Vishada Sindhu, 39.

290 Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay, Jal Pratapchand, Calcutta: Vidyamandir, 1994 (1883); Gautam Bhadra, Jal Rajar Katha: Bardhamaner Pratapchand, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2002; Chatterjee, Princely Impostor? 291 Agamben, Kingdom, 139.

292 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Pratinidhi’ in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 1, 729–31.

293 Manomohan Basu, Harishchandra Natak, Calcutta: Manomohan Library, 1898, copy enclosed in File 222 of 1916, Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal. 294 Mahendra Gupta, ‘Rani Bhavani’ (1942).

295 Mahatma Gandhi, ‘Reminiscences of Kathiawar-II’, in CWMG vol. 26, 247–48.

296 See Jyotirindranath Tagore, Marcus Aureliuser Atmachinta, Hooghly: Lalbihari

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280

The Mortal God Baral, 1911; Rajanikanta Guha, Mul Greek haite Anudita Samrat Marcus Aurelius Antoninuser Atmachinta, Calcutta: Prabasi Karyalay, 1912; K. M. Munshi, Bhagavad Gita and Modern Life, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1955, 101–3.

297 Constituent Assembly Debates, Report, vol. 4, 772–73: speech of Radhakrishnan, 22 July 1947; vol. 7, 373–74: speech of Brajeshwar Prasad, 9 November 1948. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) was a philosopher from Madras Presidency; he rose to the offices of Vice-President of India (1952–62) and President of India (1962–67). In the Constituent Assembly, he represented United Provinces. Prasad was a representative to the Constituent Assembly from Bihar. 298 Nehru, Autobiography, 528.

299 Jawaharlal Nehru, Inside America, Delhi: National Book Stall, 1950, 32.

300 K. P. Jayaswal, Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times, 2 volumes in 1, Calcutta: Butterworth & Co., 1924, Part II, 210. K. P. Jayaswal (1881–1937) was an Indian nationalist historian. For a pioneering analysis of Jayaswal, including his theory of contractual kingship, see Inden, Imagining India, 188–89. 301 Quotes from Jayaswal, Hindu Polity, Part I, 11–12, 17, Part II, 60. 302 Ibid., Part I, 173–74. See also Part II, 5-6. 303 Ibid., Part I, 97.

304 Pramathanath Banerjea, Public Administration in Ancient India, London: Macmillan and Co., 1916, 72. Pramathanath Banerjea (1879–1960) was an Indian nationalist economist, political scientist and historian. 305 Ibid., 51. On Banerjea, see also Inden, Imagining India, 192–93. 306 Banerjea, Public Administration, 34–37.

307 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Letter from the Government of India, 5th March 1919, and enclosures, on the questions raised in the report on Indian constitutional reforms. Minute of Dissent by Sir C. Sankaran Nair, March 5, 1919, 58–59. Sankaran Nair (1857–1934) was a lawyer and judge, who became a President of the Indian National Congress in 1897 and a Member of the Viceroy’s Council in 1915. 308 Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919, 22–23.

309 Ibid., vii-viii. Robert Crewe-Milnes, the Marquess of Crewe (1858–1945), was a Liberal statesman who served as Secretary of State for India (1910–15).

310 D. R. Bhandarkar, Lectures on the Ancient History of India: On the Period from 650 to 325 BC, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1919, 119–22. D. R. Bhandarkar (1875–1950) was a celebrated archaeologist and historian. Originally from Bombay Presidency, he also served as Professor in the University of Calcutta. 311 Ibid., 122–24.

312 U. N. Ghoshal, A History of Hindu Political Theories: From the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century AD, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1923, 65–66, 271–78. U. N. Ghoshal (1886–1969) was a nationalist historian from Bengal.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 281 313 H. N. Sinha, Sovereignty in Ancient Indian Polity: A Study in the Evolution of Early Indian State, London: Luzac & Co., 1938, i. 314 Ibid., xviii.

315 Ibid., 72–73. 316 Ibid., 25–26.

317 For a fascinating analysis, see Prathama Banerjee, ‘Chanakya/Kautilya: History, Philosophy, Theatre and the 20th Century ‘Political’,’ History of the Present 2(1) 2012: 24–51. 318 Radhakumud Mookerji, ‘Introduction’, in Narendra Nath Law, Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity (based on the Arthasastra of Kautilya), London: Longmans and Co., 1914, xliii–xlv. 319 Law, Hindu Polity, 2. 320 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946 – April 1961, Delhi: Government of India, 1961, 101–2. 321 Inden, Imagining India, 192–96; Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic, 168–207; P. T. Nair, Indian National Songs and Symbols, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1987, 74–97; Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 4, 22 July 1947, 761–92; vol. 5, 14 August 1947, 8–9. 322 D. L. Roy, ‘Chandragupta’.

323 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Bharatavarsher Svadhinata evam Paradhinata’ in ‘Vividha Pravandha’, vol. 1 (1887) in Bankimarachanavali, vol. 2, 212–13. 324 Vivekananda, ‘India’s Message to the World’ in Complete Vivekananda, vol. 4, 309– 10. 325 Dirks, Castes, 3–5, 229–74. As an example of this articulation, see Nehru, Autobiography, 431–32, 596.

326 Nehru, Discovery, 123–24; The Mind of Mr Nehru: An Interview by R. K. Karanjia, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960, 24; B. N. Mullik (ed.) Nehru on Police, Dehra Dun: Palit and Dutt, 1970, 74, 76. 327 Constituent Assembly Debates, Report, vol. 2, 20 January 1947, 255–56.

328 Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, 24–25. 329 U. N. Ghoshal, History of Hindu Public Life, Part I, Calcutta: Romesh Ghoshal, 1945; Mookerji, Local Government, 23–24. 330 Banerjea, Public Administration, 74. 331 Sinha, Sovereignty, 25–26.

332 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Early Indian Polity’ (1908), in Complete Aurobindo, vols. 6 and 7, 943–46. 333 Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Oligarchy or Democracy?’ (1908), in ibid., 965–66.

334 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘Civic Freedom and Individual Perfection’ (1905) in Swadeshi and Swaraj, 37–38. 335 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 189–90.

336 On medieval and modern Western legacies of the trifunctional structure, as argued

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282

The Mortal God by scholars relating themselves to Dumézil’s arguments, see: Jean Batany, ‘Des “Trois Fonctions” aux “Trois États”?’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 18(5) 1963: 933–38 ; D. Dubuisson, ‘L’Irlande et la Théorie Médiévale des “Trois Ordres”’, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 188(1) 1975: 35–63; Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (1978); Claude Carozzi, ‘Les Fondements de la Tripartition Sociale chez Adalbéron de Laon’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33(4) 1978: 683–702; Jacques Le Goff, ‘Les Trois Fonctions Indo-Européennes, l’Historien et l’Europe Féodale’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 34(6) 1979: 1187–215; J. H. Grisward, ‘Trois Perspectives Médiévales’, in Jean-Claude Rivière (ed.), Georges Dumézil à la Découverte des Indo-Européens, Paris: Copernic, 1979, 197–217; Joseph A. Dane, ‘The Three Estates and Other Mediaeval Trinities’, Florilegium 3, 1981: 283–309; Joël H. Grisward, Archéologie de l’Epopée Médiévale: Structures Trifonctionnelles et Mythes Indo-Européennes dans le Cycle des Narbonnais, Paris: Payot, 1981; Paul Edward Dutton, ‘Illustre civitatis et populi exemplum: Plato’s Timaeus and the Transmission from Calcidius to the End of the Twelfth Century of a Tripartite Schema of Society’, Mediaeval Studies 45, 1983: 79–119; Thomas D. Hill, ‘Rigsthula: Some Medieval Christian Analogues’, Speculum 61(1) 1986: 79–89; Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘Le “Baptême” du Schéma des Trois Ordres Fonctionnels: L’apport de l’ecole d’Auxerre dans la seconde moitié du IXe siècle’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 41(1) 1986: 101–26; Georges Dumézil, Apollon Sonore at Autres Essais: Esquisses de Mythologie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987, 205–53; Timothy E. Powell, ‘The ‘Three Orders’ of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 23, 1994 :103–32; Edmond Ortigues, La Révélation et Le Droit, Paris: Beauchesne, 2007, 77–130. On the relation between the trifunctional system, the mixed constitution and the English Parliament, see: Bernard Cottret, ‘Le Roi, Les Lords et Les Communes: Monarchie mixte et États du Royaume en Angleterre (XVIe – XVIIIe siècles)’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 41(1) 1986: 127–50; Dumézil, Apollon Sonore, 231–41. If we follow Dumézil’s thought, then the House of Lords in the English Parliament, consisting of the lords spiritual and temporal, appears proximate to the Continental European model of three estates, itself arguably cognate to the Indian varna order. Several Indian nationalists in fact compared the varna order with the European estates system (and with socio-political classifications authored by Plato), further revealing the caste inflection to their theorising about Indo-European constitutionalism. See R. C. Majumdar, Corporate Life in Ancient India, Poona: Oriental Book Agency, 1922, 330–31; Nehru, Discovery, 84–87; V. M. Apte, Were Castes Formulated in the Age of the Rigveda?, Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute, 2, 1–2, 1940, reprint, 7; Bhupendranath Datta, Studies in Indian Social Polity, Calcutta: Purabi Publishers, 1944, 4–5, 65–66, and Bharatiya Samaj Paddhati: Utpatti o Vivartaner Itihas, vol. 3, Calcutta: Barman Publishing House, 1946, 12–13.

337 Ilyas Ahmad, The Social Contract and the Islamic State, Allahabad: The Urdu Publishing House, 1944, 190. Ilyas Ahmad was Lecturer in the Department of Civics and Politics in Allahabad University. 338 Ibid., 181.

339 Ibid., 141–43.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 283 340 Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 85; see also 102–10, 243–44, 295, 312–20, 353.

341 M. N. Roy, The Historical Role of Islam (An Essay on Islamic Culture), Bombay: Vora and Co., 1937, 38. M. N. Roy (1887–1954) was a Bengali revolutionary nationalist turned Marxist who helped found the Communist Party of India. 342 Ibid., 58–59. 343 Ibid., 25.

344 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, 125. Iqbal (1877–1938) was an Indian Muslim poet, philosopher and politician, who came to be recognised as the national poet of Pakistan. 345 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 320–23.

346 As a typical example, see: Kazi Nazrul Islam, ‘Banglar Muslimke Bnachao’ (1936), Sabhapati’s Address at Faridpur Jela Muslim Chhatra Sammilani, in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2002, 504–5. 347 Kazi Nazrul Islam, ‘Amar League Congress’ (1941), in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 5, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2004, 544–47.

348 For Savarkar’s celebration of militant Hindu kingship, see, for example: V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva, Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1989 (1923); Hindu-PadPadashahi or A Review of the Hindu Empire of Maharashtra, Delhi: Bharti Sahitya Sadan, 1971 (1925). On fascism in India, see: Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept between Two Cultures’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, edited by Peter Robb, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, 327–54; Marzia Casolari, ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly 35(4) 2000: 218–28. V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966) was a Hindu nationalist leader from Bombay Presidency who served as President of the Hindu Mahasabha.

349 As a typical example of Sarkar’s fascism-inflected celebration of militant Hindu rulership, see Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Political Philosophy of Ramdas the Guru of Shivaji the Great, reprinted from The Calcutta Review, November 1935. On Sarkar, see Satadru Sen, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the Nation to the World, Delhi: Routledge, 2015. 350 Casolari, ‘Tie-Up’, 221. B. S. Moonje (1872–1948) was a Hindu nationalist leader who also served as President of the Hindu Mahasabha. 351 Taranath Ray, Mussolini o Vartamana Italy, Calcutta: Calcutta Publishers, 1927, 6, 9–10, 17, 44, 59; quote from 17.

352 Pramathanath Ray (tr.), Paolo Orano, Mussolini, Calcutta: Chakravarti, Chatterjee and Co., 1929.

353 The argument about the Italian fascist dictator being a ‘surrogate monarch’, a replacement for the king, is offered in Duggan, ‘Crispi’, 351. A similar argument about the movement from the Kaiser ‘to a search for a replacement monarch’, paving the way for Hitler, is given in Eckart Conze, ‘‘Only a Dictator can help us Now’: Aristocracy and the Radical Right in Germany’, in European Aristocracies and the

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284

The Mortal God Radical Right, 1918–1939, edited by Karina Urbach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 136. See also Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (1987).

354 See, for example: Ray, Mussolini, 1–4, 37; ‘Mussolini versus Kipling’, The Modern Review 55(1–6) 1934: 113; ‘Report of the Fourth Convention of the Federation of Indian and Ceylonese Students Abroad, Rome, 1934’, The Modern Review 57(1–6) 1935: 605–6.

355 On Indian attitudes to German Nazism and Italian Fascism, see (apart from the texts cited above): Sarkar, Modern India, 342–43, 372, 390, 405, 411–13; Mario Prayer, ‘Italian Fascist Regime and Nationalist India, 1921–45’, International Studies 28(3) 1991: 249–71; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Indian Perspectives towards a non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism’, Transcultural Studies 2, 2014: 63–100.

356 Giuseppe Flora, ‘Tagore and Italy: Facing History and Politics’, University of Toronto Quarterly 77(4) 2008: 1025–57; Chinmay Guha, ‘Ravindranatha o Romain Rolland: Muchhe Jawa Samlapa’, and Dilip Saha, ‘Ravindranatha o Mussolini’, in Ravindranatha Thakura o Ekush Shataker Bangali, edited by Sumita Chakrabarti, Burdwan: University of Burdwan, 2011, 175–88, 201–12. 357 Flora, ‘Tagore’, 1049.

358 Rabindranath Tagore, Interview with Mrs Salvadori, in the Dolder Grand Hotel, Zurich, 5 July 1926, Record in Rabindra-Bhavana Collection, Santiniketan. 359 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Raktakarabi’ (1926), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 6, 191– 236; quotes from 193–97. 360 See, for example: Rabindranath Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 239–41.

Tagore

on

Rammohun

(1929),

in

361 Letter from Rabindranath Tagore to Amiya Chakravarti, 20 May 1939, in Chithipatra, vol. 11, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 2010, 282. 362 Nepal Majumdar, Bharate Jatiyata o Antarjatikata evam Ravindranatha, vols. 2–6, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1996 (1963–80).

363 C. F. Andrews, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, The Modern Review 64(1–6) 1938: 548; Navras Jaat Aafreedi, ‘Tagore’s Association with Jews’, 17 October 2015, available at: https://cafedissensus.com/2015/10/17/tagores-association-with-jews/, accessed on 17 September 2016.

364 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Deshanayaka’ (1939), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 16, 1229, 1235–37. Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) was an Indian nationalist leader; he took Japanese help during the Second World War in a failed attempt to free India from British colonial rule. 365 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Tasher Desha’ (1933, 1939), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 6, 324–25.

366 See, for example: Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose, Delhi: Viking, 1990; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire, Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011; Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 328–29.

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 285 367 Markus Daechsel, ‘Scientism and its Discontents: The Indo-Muslim “Fascism” of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi’, Modern Intellectual History 3(3)2006: 443–72.

368 Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin, London: Routledge, 2002, especially 86–100; S. Sayyid and I. D. Tyrer, ‘Ancestor Worship and the Irony of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan’, Contemporary South Asia 11(1) 2002: 57–75. Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) was a Muslim League politician; he is considered as the ‘founder’ of Pakistan. He served as Pakistan’s first Governor-General. 369 Sardar Fazlul Karim (ed.), Pakistan Andolana o Muslim Sahitya, Dacca: Bangla Academy, 1968, especially 161–85 (source of quotes); Nitai Das, Pakistan Andolana o Bangla Kavita, Dacca: Bangla Academy, 1993.

370 See, for example: Golam Mostafa, Islam o Communism, Dhaka: Ahmad Publishing, 1981 (1946, 1964); Abul Hashim, The Creed of Islam or the Revolutionary Character of Kalima, Dacca: Islamic Foundation, 1980 (1950); Morshed S. Hasan, Purva Banglay Chintacharcha, 1947–1970: Dvanda o Pratikriya, Dacca: Anupam Prakashani, 2007, 374–75, 716–21, 747–64; Das, Pakistan, 74, 77–78. Golam Mostafa (1897–1964) was a Bengali Muslim litterateur. Abul Hashim (1905–74) was a Bengali Muslim politician who helped in the success of the Pakistan movement in eastern Bengal. 371 Constituent Assembly Debates, Report, vol. 1, 13 December 1946. 372 Ibid., vol. 2, 21 January 1947. 373 Ibid. 374 Ibid. 375 Ibid., vol. 9, 15 September 1949. 376 Ibid. 377 Ibid., vol. 9, 16 September 1949. 378 Ibid., vol. 11, 24 November 1949. 379 Ibid., vol. 11, 21 November 1949. 380 Ibid. 381 Ibid. 382 Ibid., vol. 11, 23 November 1949. 383 Ibid. 384 See, for example, Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tine, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905-1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54(1) 2012: 65–92. 385 Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies 38(3) 2004: 703–44. 386 Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890–1977) was colonial India’s most famous linguist. For Rabindranath’s views on Greater India, see his address during the farewell reception organized by the Greater India Society before his 1927 tour: ‘Brhattara Bharata’, in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 667–71. I have drawn information about the trip from Rabindranath Tagore, Java-yatrir Patra, Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, 1986 (1929); Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Ravindra-sangame Dvipamaya Bharata o Shyama-

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desha, Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1964; Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, Ravindrajivani o Ravindra-sahitya Praveshaka, vol. 2, Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, 1936, 329–40; Arun Das Gupta, ‘Rabindranath Tagore in Indonesia: An Experiment in Bridge-Building’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158(3) 2002: 451– 77; Madelon Djajadiningrat-Nieuwenhuis, ‘Mangkunegoro VII and Rabindranath Tagore: A Brief Meeting of Like Minds’, Indonesia and the Malay World 34(98) 2006: 99–108; Martin Ramstedt, ‘Colonial Encounters between India and Indonesia’, South Asian History and Culture 2(4) 2011: 522–39. 387 Rabindranath Tagore, Java-yatrir Patra; Chatterji, Dvipamaya Bharata. 388 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 389 Rabindranath Tagore, Java-yatrir Patra, 47. 390 Chatterji, Dvipamaya Bharata, 378. 391 Ibid., 379. 392 Ibid., 88. In rendering the names of Indonesian rulers, I follow the transliterations of Suniti Kumar Chatterji. 393 Chatterji, Dvipamaya Bharata, 571. Chittaranjan Das (1869–1925) and Motilal Nehru (1861–1931) were Indian nationalist leaders. 394 Copy of an S.B. Officer’s Report, 15.7.1927, Copy of an S.B. Officer’s Report, 17.7.1927, Copy of a Report of an Officer to the Department, 15.7.1927, Report of Inspector of Bolpur Circle, R.A. 9.1.1933, Letter from Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, to Rai N. Mazumdar Bahadur, Special Superintendent of Police, I.B. Bengal, Calcutta, Letter of 13 February, 1933, to P. C. Bamford, I.P., Dy. Director, Government of India, Home Department, in Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal record: Sl No. 69/1925, File No. 285/25. 395 On the colonially mediated construction of ‘theatre states’, see Margaret J. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 396 In the famous formulation of Geertz, Negara (13), in Bali, ‘Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power.’ 397 Chatterji, Dvipamaya Bharata, 593–645; quote from 594. 398 Ibid., 633–34, 677–79. Suniti Kumar Chatterji (678) records a very interesting variation in the text of this poem. In the version he recorded in Siam, Rabindranath used the phrase ‘samagra prajare tava’ (all your subjects). This was probably the version presented to Rama VII. In the later printed version of the poem, the phrase was replaced with ‘sarvajanagane tava’ (all your people). 399 Afshin Marashi, ‘Imagining Hafez: Rabindranath Tagore in Iran, 1932’, Journal of Persianate Studies 3(1) 2010: 69; see also Afshin Marashi, ‘Patron and Patriot: Dinshah J. Irani and the Revival of Indo-Iranian Culture’, Iranian Studies 46(2) 2013: 185–206. 400 Rabindranath Tagore, Parasya-yatri, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1963 (1932–33);

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‘One Law, One Nation, One Throne’ 287 Kedarnath Chattopadhyay’s account in Pravasi, 1339 BS (1932–33), part 1, 552–62, 700–12, 865–94; 1339 BS, part 2, 122–38, 283–94, 433–41, 580–85, 733–41, 874– 85; 1340 BS (1933–34), part 1, 114–21; Rabindranath’s chapter on Zarathustra in The Religion of Man, Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931, 72–87 (quote from 82). 401 Rabindranath Tagore, Parasya-yatri, 53. 402 Ibid., 61–62. 403 Ibid., 77. 404 Ibid., 134–36. 405 Ibid., 126. 406 Nazrul Islam, ‘Zulfiqar’ (1932), in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, 297. 407 RNPB: Asr-e-Jadid, 22 January 1926; see also Hablul Matin (Calcutta), 8 December 1925, 12 January 1926, and 11 May 1926; Hedayat (Khulna), Kartick 1343 BS (1936).

408 Kalidas Nag, Discovery of Asia, Calcutta: The Institute of Asian African Relations, 1957, 139–67; quote from 155. Kalidas Nag (1892–1966) was a Bengali intellectual, co-organizer of the Greater India movement, and a member of the Rajya Sabha between 1952 and 1954. 409 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Iranianism: Iranian Culture and its Impact on the World from Achaemenian Times, Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1972; quotes from 10, 20 and 33.

410 Rabindranath Tagore, Parasya-yatri, 94–106, 147–52; quotes from 147–48, 150; Kedarnath Chattopadhyay’s account in Pravasi. 411 Rabindranath Tagore, Parasya-yatri, 99.

412 Nazrul Islam, ‘Zulfiqar’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, 297. 413 ‘Nrpati Faisal’, in Pravasi, 1340 BS (1933–34), part 2, 159–60. 414 RNPB: Azad (Calcutta), 29 November 1936. 415 Nag, Discovery, 174. 416 Ibid., 174. 417 Ibid., 185.

418 Nazrul Islam, ‘Hena’, in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 1, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2005, 262–72; Muzaffar Ahmad, Kazi Nazrul Islam: Smrtikatha, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 2009 (1965), 110. 419 Nazrul Islam ‘Amanullah’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, 115–18.

420 Muzaffar Ahmad, Amar Jivana o Bharater Communist Party, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 2010 (1969), 143–49; quote from 148. Muzaffar Ahmad (1889–1973) was a Bengali Communist politician. 421 Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904–74) was a noted Bengali litterateur and scholar. For his description of Amanullah’s Afghanistan, published as Deshe Videshe (1949), see Syed Mujtaba Ali Rachanavali, vol. 9, Calcutta: Mitra o Ghosh Publishers, 1999, 1–126 and vol. 10, Calcutta: Mitra o Ghosh Publishers, 1997, 1–83. 422 Syed Mujtaba Ali, Syed Mujtaba Ali Rachanavali, Calcutta: Mitra o Ghosh

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423 Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967) was a Bengali jurist.

424 I summarise here the argument I have offered in detail (also drawing on, and critiquing, existing historiography on the dissent) in Milinda Banerjee, ‘Does International Criminal Justice Require a Sovereign? Historicizing Radhabinod Pal’s Tokyo Judgment in Light of his ‘Indian’ Legal Philosophy’, in Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, vol. 2, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Cheah Wui Ling and Yi Ping, Brussels: Torkel Opsahl, 2014, 67–117. For Pal’s dissent, see International Military Tribunal for the Far East, United States of America et al. v. Araki Sadao et al., Judgment of The Hon’ble Mr. Justice Pal, Member from India, available at International Criminal Court Legal Tools Database, available at: http://www.legaltools.org/en/go-to-database/ltfolder/0_29521/#results, accessed on 27 May 2014. To analyse Pal’s complex views about the relation between divine rulership, natural law and sovereignty, I have drawn on Radhabinod Pal, The Hindu Philosophy of Law, Calcutta: Biswabhandar Press, (ca.) 1927; Radhabinod Pal, The History of Hindu Law in the Vedic Age and in Post-Vedic Times down to the Institutes of Manu, Calcutta: Biswabhandar Press, (ca.) 1929; enlarged edition, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1958; Radhabinod Pal, Crimes in International Relations, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1955. On the dates of Pal’s texts, see Banerjee, ‘International Criminal’, 73. 425 Pal, History (1958), 3. 426 Ibid., 220–21.

427 Banerjee, ‘International Criminal’.

428 Jawaharlal Nehru (‘Chanakya’), ‘The Rashtrapati’ (The Modern Review, 5 October 1937), in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 8, edited by S. Gopal, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1976, 520–23.

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4 ‘One has to Rule Oneself’ Collectivising Sovereignty in Peasant Politics 4.1 Introduction This chapter focuses on ‘peasant’ (including ‘tribal’) communities in twentiethcentury India.1 They occupied ambiguous and shifting positions in ‘caste’ (varna-jati) hierarchies, and one of the ways in which their politics can be conceptualised is through the prism of ‘caste’ politics. I focus particularly on those peasant groups which claimed a ‘royal’ origin, describing themselves as belonging to the Kshatriya varna and as descendants and kinsmen of Kshatriya rulers. These assertions bolstered their claim to rule themselves, implying both mastery over their individual selves and a collectivised claim to socialpolitical authority. Sometimes they asserted a divine identity and ancestry by deploying a Kshatriya theology. I argue that these peasant communities contributed significantly towards collectivising and democratising notions of rulership, divinity and sovereignty in twentieth-century India. They did this by flexibly combining precolonial South Asian ideas about collective rulership and godhood with Western-origin democratic and socialist ideas. Precolonial-origin community structures were linked by peasant politicians with Western-modern institutional forms to produce hybridised associations. Given that these peasant discourses were generally carried out in regional Indian languages and not in English, and in locally-circulated journals and pamphlets that seldom reached metropolitan elite audiences (and have often become difficult to locate today except in select and scattered public and private archives), the historiographic amnesia from which these discourses have suffered needs urgent remedy. As mentioned in the beginning of this book, these peasant actors created such notions of collectivised rulership to demand from the state reservations in political representation, education and employment. They regarded such measures as absolutely indispensable in combating the asymmetries of economic, social, ritual and political power which subalternised them vis-à-vis high-caste Indians. Across the early-mid twentieth century, the British as well as some Indian princes, in order to attract the political loyalty of these communities (in

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an era of rising anti-colonial nationalism), began to gradually respond to some of their demands about reservation and welfare. Simultaneously, these peasant groups organized initiatives to spread modern education, to foster agricultural, industrial and financial development, and to improve healthcare facilities for their members. The claim to regality thus encompassed a wide range of grassroots measures to ‘subalternise capital’ and ‘vernacularise progress’. From the latenineteenth century, Bombay and Madras Presidencies witnessed a particularly remarkable growth of non-Brahmin politics. While, initially, relatively well-off sections among non-Brahmin communities led these campaigns, gradually more subaltern communities – including the so-called ‘untouchable’ groups – also began to emerge into pan-Indian visibility. The interwar-era Depressed Classes movement arose from their ranks, organized through a network of local and translocal caste associations, and led by a remarkable generation of politicians and intellectuals, including, most famously, B. R. Ambedkar. By the 1930s, after complex negotiations between the British, the Indian nationalist leadership and these organizations, the Depressed Classes, now renamed the Scheduled Castes, acquired reservations in political representation across India: something they have continued to enjoy, along with another category of communities labelled the Scheduled Tribes, until today. From the 1990s, reservations have also been extended to communities categorised as the Other Backward Classes, who are also perceived to be socio-economically disempowered, though less so than the Scheduled Castes or Tribes. Several important peasant communities in India have been bracketed within the three above-mentioned categories, and have thus acquired the right to reservations in politics, education and employment. While, in the early postcolonial decades, the Congress, as the premium Indian nationalist party, had enjoyed a certain political hegemony, gradually its single-party dominance came to be dismantled. Haltingly from the 1960s and 1970s, and with sustained vigour from the 1980s and 1990s, regional political formations – often with their social base in these ‘middle’ and ‘lower’ caste communities – have captured political power in different states within India and forced national parties like the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to enter into alliance with them at the federal as well as provincial levels. Obviously, studying the ideologies of rulership constructed by these communities and their political platforms is crucial if we are to understand the democratisation and subalternisation of Indian politics.2 But to understand how so-called ‘middle’ and ‘lower’ caste groups have

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revolutionised Indian politics, one also needs to grapple with debates on the very idea of caste. For a long time, caste was seen as a uniquely Indian way of arranging hierarchy, dividing society into watertight categories. It was thought that members of a particular caste adhered to an unchangeable social identity and profession, and that they were largely forbidden from having sexual – or even intensive social and personal – interactions with members of other castes. Nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European scholars often interpreted caste in terms of race: as a mechanism through which Aryan conquerors of India maintained their social superiority over the indigenous non-Aryans. Differences between ‘upper castes’ and ‘lower castes’ were supposed to be immutable, and, further, to have a racial origin. Indian nationalist elites – generally drawn from literate communities with a Sanskritic cultural ethos – often eagerly accepted this idea of Aryan race ancestry (which gave them a supposed civilizational parity with the Europeans), even as they promoted the idea that caste helped maintain a harmonious Indian society by organizing social division of labour in a well-balanced way. Some of them also insisted on removing the most exploitative and violent aspects of caste discrimination, and especially practices relating to ‘untouchability’. To many Europeans as well as members of highcaste Indian gentry, the lower castes, as descendants of non-Aryans, were however essentially, and ineradicably, civilizationally inferior. British colonial administrators used the idea of caste to suggest that India – deeply divided as it was in terms of race and community – could never evolve into a nation; hence it needed perpetual British tutelage. Over the course of the early-mid twentieth century, the British sometimes also posed as the defenders of the ‘lower castes’ against ‘upper caste’ supremacy.3 Such an understanding of India as the archetypal land of hierarchy persisted into the 1960s, when the French scholar Louis Dumont differentiated the Indian Homo hierarchicus, hierarchical man, from the Western Homo aequalis, equal man.4 There were problems with this classic paradigm. If caste was a rigid ‘thing’, it was difficult to explain multiple instances of social mobility in the precolonial and colonial, not to mention postcolonial, periods. Related to this was the disjuncture between jati (the endogamous community) and varna (the normative classification, rooted in ancient Sanskrit texts, and comprising the Brahmana – anglicised as Brahmin – or the scholar-priest, the Kshatriya or the warrior-ruler, the Vaishya or the respectable commoner, and the Shudra or the servile class). M. N. Srinivas propounded the theory of ‘Sanskritisation’ to

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explain how communities (jatis) ranked low in the Brahmanical varna order, could, by adopting Brahmanical norms, gain a higher varna status.5 Other scholars, including Hitesranjan Sanyal on Bengal, suggested that lower-status jatis could, by changing their occupation (for example, by transforming from pastoralists into peasants, or by adopting new trades), and by patronising various modes of pious behaviour (such as temple-construction), acquire a higher varna and jati categorisation.6 Scholars like Surajit Sinha, Romila Thapar and Brajadulal Chattopadhyay conceptualised models of Kshatriyaisation and Rajputisation through which martial-peasant groups (from ancient times into the late precolonial era) translated their authority over land and men into the acquisition of a commensurate Kshatriya status.7

In a sense, the claim about being a Kshatriya was a claim for a stake in sovereignty. While modern notions and practices of state sovereignty were obviously absent in precolonial India, Romila Thapar has suggested that kshatra implied something like ‘pouvoir au sens de souveraineté’, power in the sense of sovereignty.8 Emile Benveniste has further related kshatra to ancient Iranian terms of rulership and divinity. The root concept signified ‘le pouvoir royal’ (the royal power) and mastery; it has given rise to two key Iranian terms, Shah (king) and Khuda (God).9 Peasant Kshatriyaisation in modern India, if not in earlier centuries as well, can be regarded as assertions of mastery, rulership and sovereignty. Further, the claim of possessing kshatra or of being part of a rajavamsha (royal dynasty or lineage), was generally in peasant discourse a collective assertion, though this was also equated with the institution of the raja. This collectivised sensibility about rulership was rooted in the decentralised structure of precolonial Indian polities and the group nature of upward mobility, but was also a conscious articulation for pursuing contemporary political ends. I argue that sovereignty in these discourses existed in tension between rulership and collectivity; peasants claimed collective rulership. The sovereign’s body encompassed and expressed the rulership of the multitudes. While Kshatriyaising claims were/are often made by peasant-origin communities, there are also instances of Kshatriyaisation among non-agrarian labouring classes: these include the Chamar-Yatav community (of leatherworker origin), a cornerstone of the modern ‘untouchable’, Scheduled Caste, or Dalit movement. Some of the most politically influential peasant and nonpeasant labouring communities in modern India have been groups which have at some time (generally over several decades, if not centuries) claimed Kshatriya

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identity, including Yadavs, Kurmis, Kushvahas, Jats, Patidars, Marathas, Reddis and Nadars. Claims of Kshatriya identity can be found across South Asia, from Rajasthan and the Hindi heartland to Manipur and Nepal, with claims also emerging from the Deccan and the extreme south.10 Of my two case studies, the Rajavamshis, as already mentioned before, are today the largest Scheduled Caste in West Bengal. The local communities of Tripura were/are classed as ‘tribes’ by the colonial and postcolonial state, and merit reservation as part of the constitutional category of ‘Scheduled Tribes’.

The ubiquity of Kshatriyaisation claims in India across historical epochs has necessitated a broader re-conceptualisation of caste. Dirk Kolff has argued that contrary to conventional Orientalist understandings, the precolonial Indian peasantry had traditionally never been a uniformly subordinated populace. Rather, they were an armed populace that often successfully circumscribed the reach of state power as well as of varna-jati hierarchies. Categories like ‘Rajput’ were open status groups which embraced significant sections of the rural population who combined agrarian and military labour. Only with the establishment of British rule, and the firm shift in the balance of power in favour of the centralised state and away from the constellations of regional polities and local armed communities, could the modern caste system emerge.11 Stewart Gordon argues similarly about the inclusive nature of the precolonial ‘Maratha’ identity and its roots in a broad array of local peasant and pastoral communities of the Deccan.12 In a comparable manner, Nicholas Dirks suggests that the king and his military retinue (generally drawn from armed peasant and pastoral communities), and not the Brahmin, determined the constitution of political and social power in precolonial India. The situation changed in the colonial era, as the British placed new premium on bureaucracy and law as determinants of social order, with Brahmins (and allied literate castes) entrusted with arbitrating and policing this order. Sanskritic texts were now reified as the repositories of this Hindu legal order, while non-Brahmin militant kingship and customs were sidelined. Dirks summarises that ‘colonialism seems to have created much of what is now accepted as Indian “tradition”, including an autonomous caste structure with the Brahman clearly at the head’.13 Thus, ‘Brahmans reached a new high under British colonialism both in their participation in the development of Hindu Law and in their preponderance in colonial administration.’14 Susan Bayly has designated the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century as a time of ‘Brahman Raj’ when South Asian rulers (like the Peshwas in western India)

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and the British began emphasising Brahmanical norms in their projects of state formation, gentrification and social disciplining. Thus ‘the emergence of ‘traditional’ caste society was, in fact, a comparatively recent product of these transformations in Indian life and thought.’15

The larger picture that emerges from these studies is that varna order was hegemonic in those parts of precolonial India which had centuries-old experiences of state formation, like the Gangetic plains in the north and the Kaveri river valley in the south. In other places, like the Punjab, the Deccan, eastern Bengal and the north-eastern regions of India, entrenched presence of armed peasant, pastoral and forest-oriented groups circumscribed the spread of varna hierarchies. Kshatriyaisation marked the incorporation of martial peasants into varna order, even as peasant elites asserted a high status. With British demilitarisation of peasants, the coerced conversion of these peasants into regular revenue- and rent-paying subalterns, and the colonial alliance with Brahmanical gentry, distinctions between ‘upper castes’ and ‘lower castes’ assumed a more static shape, even as Brahmanical varna ideals deepened their spatial and social reach. British imperial ethnology, by adding racial explanations to such (reconstructed) caste hierarchies, added further normative markers to the advent of the ‘caste system’ in its modern form.16 Moreover, colonial courts brought non-Brahmin groups into the orbit of Brahmanically-defined AngloHindu law. As Rachel Sturman summarises, this meant that: practices that had historically been the exclusive privilege of the high castes were in the colonial courts interpreted as normative and extended to lower castes as well. […] One of the defining features of these processes was the expansion of patriarchal practices regarding marriage, divorce, widowhood, and the like to lower-caste communities that had never previously practiced them.17

British imperial theories about martial race and virile masculinity instigated many of these lower caste communities to accentuate asymmetrical gender relations as part of the bid to become ‘Kshatriya’ and appear as suitable candidates for recruitment to the colonial army.18 While claiming a higher status, male peasants often regulated female social behaviour and positioned women as subordinate supporters rather than as autonomous individuals. However, they also offered women some limited scope for agency in education and politics. Further, peasant women sometimes successfully combated male dominance.

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In terms of the relation between Kshatriyaisation and democratic politics in modern India, William Pinch has shown incisively how Kshatriyaisation and Vaishnava asceticism helped lower caste groups in interwar northern India to claim a higher social status and demand a more equitable society. He has given central importance to the new kinds of thinking which were generated through such intersections.19 Focusing on Bihar (and northern India more generally), Walter Hauser argues that the ‘armed society’ nature of the Indian countryside implied that both elite and subaltern rural groups drew upon ‘martial sensibilities’; hence the endemic class and caste conflict in rural areas, where even as ‘upper caste’ elites try to dominate the ‘lower castes’, the latter resist them with analogous fortitude. Hauser thinks that ‘lower caste’ mobilisation and ultra-left insurgencies draw strength from this ‘martial tradition’ of peasant groups.20 Taking a cue from these various perspectives, and giving cardinal importance to political thought, this chapter underlines the significance of idioms of peasant-Kshatriya sovereignty in the emergence of modern Indian democratic vocabularies. It shows how peasant politicians and intellectuals connected precolonial-origin community structures, traditions and theologies to Western-modern associational politics and democratic-socialist rights-consciousness in order to fight against the domination of upper caste Indian elites.

4.2 Kshatriyaisation and political identity in colonial Bengal With some significant exceptions which are noted below, processes of Kshatriyaisation in colonial Bengal have received little systematic scholarly attention – and even less so with respect to their intellectual history. Partly this was because large parts of eastern Bengal were peasantised in the early modern period under the aegis of Islamic leadership; hence pioneer peasant groups which, in other parts of India, would have articulated their gentrification and social authority through a Kshatriya grammar, did so in Bengal through Islamic politico-cultural vocabularies.21 However, especially in western, south-western and northern Bengal, there were still significant cases of Kshatriyaisation, from the precolonial period into the twentieth century.22 Admittedly, Brahmins sometimes denied the Kshatriya status of these communities, suggesting that there were no true Kshatriyas in the present age.23 Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of leftist politics in West Bengal may also

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have discouraged scholarly as well as public appreciation of Kshatriyaisation in Bengal. In twentieth-century western Bengal, peasant elites, the prime agents of Kshatriyaisation through much of premodern and modern India, were further inhibited in the expression of their social and political authority by entrenched high-caste bhadralok hegemony as well as by the radical politics of the small and landless peasantry.24 Yet, as shown below, Kshatriyaisation movements had a major constitutive impact on the growth of democratic politics in colonial (and sometimes postcolonial) Bengal, including in Cooch Behar and Tripura.

The Kayasthas offer an interesting instance of elite Kshatriyaisation in colonial Bengal. A scribal-origin community, they were associated with administrative and landed power in Bengal under successive Indo-Islamic regimes as well as in the colonial era. A main pillar of the colonial bhadralok class (along with the Brahmins and the Baidyas), they had little incentive to break rank and lead any radical movement against Brahmanical caste hierarchy. Yet, some of their leading members, including Vivekananda (see chapter 2), claimed Kshatriya status and sought to promote a distinctive Kshatriya variant of Indian nationalist discourse; sometimes this went hand in hand with critiques of Brahmins. Kayastha intellectuals often cast late precolonial Bengali chiefs like Pratapaditya and Sitaram, sovereign figures celebrated by Indian nationalist writers, as also uniquely Kayastha heroes, and evidence of Kayastha ability to be leaders of the nation. Many Kayastha ideologues promoted assumption of the sacred thread as a marker of superiority over their supposed social ‘inferiors’.25 Peasant and pastoral communities in early-mid twentieth century Bengal also frequently claimed a royal Kshatriya ancestry, asserted kinship with local zamindari rulerships (which had indeed often emerged from within these communities), and drew on regional versions of stories and cults of gods. For example, the Mahishyas of south-western Bengal asserted their Kshatriya descent, linked themselves to local rulerships such as those of Maynagarh, Tamluk and Sujamutha, and also established solidarity with the similarly-placed Khandayats in neighbouring Orissa.26 They provided a significant social base for the growth of Congress nationalism in interwar western Bengal.27 The Aguris of western Bengal claimed Ugra Kshatriya identity; they were also associated with the Burdwan zamindari lineage and wielded significant power in the region in nationalist as well as Communist politics across the twentieth century.28 Bengali Goalas or Gops, like their northern Indian counterparts, based their pastoral community identity on descent from the mythical King Yadu, claimed

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kinship with Krishna as well as with various historical and contemporary ruling dynasties – from the ancient Mauryas to Rajput, Maratha and Mysore lineages – and in general adopted a Yadav Kshatriya identity. The participation of some members of their community as soldiers in the First World War was adduced as further evidence of their regal-Kshatriya nature.29

Somewhat lower down the Brahmanical scale of hierarchy, the Bagdis of western Bengal were another large peasant group: in the interwar years, they claimed to be Barga or Byaghra Kshatriyas. They also variously claimed to be descendants of the gods Shiva and Parvati – in the late precolonial narrative genre of Shivayan, the goddess appeared as a Bagdi woman to seduce Shiva – or of King Rama, or of the ruler Hamvir of the Bishnupur royal (and later, zamindari) lineage. (Hamvir was himself sometimes regarded as a descendant of Shiva and of the Goddess in her Bagdi form.)30 In postcolonial decades, the Bagdis gradually emerged as a major bastion of Communist politics.31 Similarly, the Pods of southern Bengal regarded themselves as Paundra Kshatriyas and as descendants of King Pundra. They blamed Parashurama, the legendary Brahmin enemy of the Kshatriyas, for their present abjection.32 Meanwhile, on the Bengal-Bihar frontier, the Kurmi-Mahatos declared their Kshatriyahood, and claimed relation with Rana Pratap of Mewar and with the Maratha ruler Shivaji.33 Bhumij actors in the same region also claimed Kshatriya status with increased articulation in the interwar years.34 In eastern Bengal, the fisher community of Jhalo Malos related the ‘violence’ of their profession to their Kshatriya temperament.35 In sub-Himalayan northern Bengal and Assam, the agriculturist as well as forest-dependent Rabhas have claimed royal and Kshatriya ancestry until today. As B. G. Karlsson remarks, ‘Rabha consider themselves the descendants of the Koch Raja; hence, they are the Kocha. […] It is suspected that the Bengali sarkar purposefully withholds their royal Koch heritage as a way of keeping them down.’36 Certain artisanal-mercantile communities in late-colonial Bengal also asserted Kshatriya genealogy. Among them were Shunris, who declared themselves as Shaundik Kshatriyas, descended from the royal Lunar Haihaya dynasty. They related themselves to Kshatriyaising programmes among other alcohol-producing groups of northern India, such as the Kalwars, and to the princely lineage of Kapurthala (in Punjab). Further, they argued that the consumption of alcohol was necessary for inducing Kshatriya valour.37 Kamars (metal-workers) similarly saw metal weapons as an indispensable constituent

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of Kshatriyahood, and hence sometimes declared themselves, including before the visiting King-Emperor George V, to be Kshatriyas.38

Why did historical, mythical, or existing kingships and dynasties achieve such foundational status for middle and lower-caste communities across Bengal, and indeed across India? I would argue that sovereignty was the central issue at stake here. Just as Hindu high-caste or Muslim elites looked back to various rulers for inspiration and identity, so did various subalternised communities found their claims for political authority on their self-proclaimed sovereign status as Kshatriya descendants and kinsmen of gods and kings. In parallel, they also regarded the sovereign – and especially the British monarch – as an exterior authority who would, like earlier Hindu rulers or even some existing princes – elevate the social status of the subaltern communities, recognise their Kshatriyahood in colonial censuses and also endow them with a share in political representation, employment and various schemes of public welfare.39 In the next two sections, we shall note how this was not an entirely unrealistic expectation: the British state and some Indian princes did play a material, and not just symbolic, role in transforming lower-caste politics. In turn, as Susan Bayly argues, such relationships ‘injected a strong element of lordly varna-consciousness’ into the non-Brahmin movements. (Bayly writes particularly about the princes of Kolhapur and Bharatpur, but her argument is generalisable.)40 Ironically however, in both Tripura and Cooch Behar, the princely sovereign could become a centre for subaltern politics most powerfully only after the princely order had come to a dramatic end following Indian independence: when local kingships, denuded of their practical sovereignty, were transformed by lower caste and ‘tribal’ actors into sovereigns prefigurative of a politics to come. In that context, they became oneiric sovereigns, symbolising not just the integrity and historicity of the people’s identity, but also the latter’s hope for a future sovereignty, of a polity freed from the domination of the ruling classes of postcolonial India.

4.3 Case study I: Tripur Kshatriyas of Tripura Tripura had for centuries been ‘a small Hindu hill kingdom that managed to maintain a precarious independence on the extreme eastern edge of the delta throughout the sultanate and Mughal periods’.41 State formation in Tripura, as in much of north-eastern India, had been fostered by chieftains with roots

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in the martial-peasant communities which straddled the worlds of shifting cultivation and sedentary agriculture. This association between the ruler and the broader community bestowed a certain regal halo on the whole community. The ethnographer H. H. Risley commented: ‘The Maharajas of Hill Tipperah, who now put forward an untenable claim to be Rajputs, are believed to belong to the Afang and Jumatya septs, the members of which frequently call themselves Rajbansi by way of recalling their relationship to the royal family.’42 The Census of 1901 similarly observed that the term Rajbansi (Rajavamshi, ‘of the royal lineage’) was used to refer to the ‘Tipara’ people and to those Hindus who had eaten with them and thereby lost their caste status.43 Much later, in his autobiography, Dasarath Deb (who was Chief Minister of Tripura from 1993 to 1998) recalled that Tripura’s ‘tribal people’ (upajatira), and especially the Tripuris, proudly considered themselves, even in the mid-twentieth century, to be ‘descendants of the rulers of Tripura’ and members ‘of the ruler’s community’ (Tripurar rajader vamshadhar, rajar jat).44 The trouble with this association was that, in the racialised milieu of the nineteenth century, aspersions about the ‘tribal’ people’s racial-civilizational status threatened the political authority and legitimacy of the monarch himself. We have already seen Risley’s sardonic comment about the Tripura ruler’s claim to a high Rajput status. Risley further cited the surveyor H. J. Reynolds to suggest that Tipperahs had ‘strongly-marked Mongolian features, with flat faces and thick lips’. They were ‘wild tribes’ who practiced ‘a debased form of Hinduism’.45 High-caste Bengalis drew on such European racial categories too. When, in the 1880s, Nabinchandra Sen (as Deputy Magistrate) had a conflict with the ruler Birchandra, he squarely blamed the ‘non-Aryan’ ruler’s pretensions to be Kshatriya, even when ‘the Creator had drawn on his form the features of the Tripura people’.46 Likewise, in a controversial history published in 1896, Kailashchandra Simha, who had also incurred enmity with Birchandra (after backing a losing pretender to the throne), denigrated the ruler and his people as ‘non-Aryans’ (anarya), indeed as similar to ‘untouchable’ Chandals; like Sen, he denied Kshatriya status to the rulers.47 The concept of Kshatriyahood, which in the precolonial era had no racial connotation and was appropriated by rulers across South Asia irrespective of their ethnic origin, was now being steadily transformed into a racially-defined ‘Aryan’ category, jeopardising the socialritual status (and associated political legitimacy) of rulers like that of Tripura. Yet, we find counter-voices as well. During the colonial censuses of 1911

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and 1921, several individuals from the ‘Tipara’ tribes successfully claimed Kshatriya status on the basis of their kinship with Tripura’s princely dynasty.48 As Indrani Chatterjee has shown, the rulers also invited the Bengali scholar Kaliprasanna Sen, to edit a modern version of the dynastic chronicle Rajamala, which endowed the rulers with a firm Kshatriya (and divine) genealogy.49 But there was another reserve power, a sort of sovereign prerogative, which Tripura’s princes could invoke. As the colonial census of 1911 noted, Hindu rulers had traditionally been the final appellate authority in resolving disputes about caste status: in the colonial era, Tripura’s rulers – along with the King of Nepal, the princes of Orissa, and rulers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts – continued to wield this power.50 In this perspective, caste was neither a Brahmin-determined timeless taxonomy of ritual purity and pollution, nor an epiphenomenon of race: it was a transformable hierarchy of power, where the prince had a final say. Exercising this right, in 1929, the ruler Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya created a Tripur Kshatriya community (samaj). Its ostensible aim was to ensure the moral and social ‘reform’ (samskara) and ‘progress in education’ (shikshonnati) of the Tripur Kshatriyas. The ruler felt that the traditional Panchayat system had been unable to guarantee ‘social discipline’ (samajik shrnkhala); the subjects too had called for ‘social reform and development’ (samajer samskara o unnati). Hence, in a special durbar held at the Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala, Bir Bikram Kishore inaugurated a sabha (assembly) of the Tripur Kshatriya Samaj, attended by 149 members of the Mandal samitis (local branches) and 11 members of its kendriya sabha (central assembly). The ruler distributed the rules of the Samaj, and exhorted its members to observe them, to abandon ‘immoral social customs’ (samajik bhrashtachara) and to serve the rajya (kingdom) and the Samaj. In turn, the Samaj members offered him the customary tribute (najar; from Indo-Islamic nazr).51 By all accounts this was a radical innovation: in a ceremonial stroke, a new unified community of Tripur Kshatriyas had been created. In 1930, another princely order defined, for the purposes of the princely state’s own census, all members of the ‘Tripura community’ (Tripura sampradaya) as Kshatriyas. They included the five communities of ‘hill subjects’ (parvatya praja) of the state: Puratan Tripura, Deshi Tripura, Noatia, Jamatia and Riang.52 The princely state’s census of 1340 Tripurabda (1930-31), published in 1343 Tripurabda (1933–34), further expounded on this classification, arranging the kingdom’s communities, not according to Brahmanical varna or European race norms, but rather according to their ritual, sexual and political relation to the

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ruler. The cosmology was simultaneously monarchic and polycentric. Heading the list of Tripur Kshatriyas were twelve lineages of thakurs descended from the ancient king Trilochana, followed by other lineages which had been accorded the thakur status in later times. Then came the Puratan or Purana Tripura, classified and defined according to their royal insignia, location in royal rituals of worship, marriage and feasting, and the services they rendered to the ruler. After them came the Deshi Tripuras, offspring of unions between Tripuris and Hindu Bengalis; Jamatias, distinguished for their royalism and military service; Riangs, also praised for their devotion to the ruler (ever since Queen Gunavati had accorded them maternal protection in the seventeenth century); and the Noatias. Finally were mentioned the communities outside the Kshatriya order, like the Halams and the Kukis.53

A principal motive for the Kshatriyaisation drive lay in the growing connections between Tripura’s princely elites and those of other parts of India: adopting Kshatriya status was absolutely essential to ensure that Tripura’s ruling classes did not get marginalised within the unified princely order which British rule fostered in India through institutions like the Chamber of Princes (formed in the aftermath of the Government of India Act of 1919). The census report noted that Tripura’s princely elites were increasingly marrying into ruling families elsewhere in India, and thereby adopting their Kshatriya customs.54 Going beyond their usual marriage pool within north-eastern India (such as with Manipur), they now married into ruling and landholding families in Nepal, Kotla, Jaipur, Baria, Balrampur and Panna. Members of the dynasty increasingly travelled across India in the early-mid twentieth century, meeting fellow princely elites on civil occasions as well as for forging political alliances; kinship offered a vital glue in sealing these networks.55 They were hardly exceptional in this regard; as Aya Ikegame has noted about Mysore, princely elites across India sought to expand their marital politics.56 To claim a Kshatriya identity was a necessity in this milieu. In this context, the constitution of a Tripur Kshatriya Samaj was a fundamental event of reconstituting sovereignty in the princely state: it guaranteed the Kshatriya status of the ruler as well as of his people, even while it strengthened the bonds between them. Samaj ceremonies closely connected the ruler, his court, the members of the kendriya sabha of the Samaj and the sardars (chiefs/leaders) of the local mandalis. In the 1930s, a conceptually fecund ceremonial was designed to mark such meetings. When the ruler entered the

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assembly, apart from military honours, music and gun salutes, he was also welcomed through the raising of the ‘royal flag’ (rajakiya pataka). The flag symbolism however changed thereafter. Once the Tripur Kshatriya Mandal sardars and volunteers had been presented to the ruler, and the sardars had offered him their ritual tribute (najar), the ruler presented the ‘national flag’ (jatiya pataka) to the Tripur Kshatriya volunteers. After the report of the Tripur Kshatriya Samaj was read out, and the prince had addressed the Samaj, this national flag was raised and the prince acclaimed.57 Historians have noted the centrality of nazr-khilat exchange in constituting sovereignty in precolonial India. Bernard Cohn suggests that in Mughal India, the ‘most literal representation of the act of incorporation into the body of the Mughal padshah was through the offering of nazr (gold coins) by a subordinate of the ruler and the ruler’s presentation of a khilat (clothes, weapons, horses and elephants)’.58 Gail Minault elaborates that the ruler thus made ‘the recipient an extension of himself, and hence delegating some of his authority’.59 While the British denuded these ceremonies of much of their political substance, in late colonial Tripura, we witness a replenishing of ceremonial: the khilat given by the ruler to his subjects in reciprocation of their nazr was nothing but the national flag itself, the symbol of an emerging notion of Tripuri nationhood. There was a political transubstantiation at work here which replaced the royal (flag) with the national (flag) in the course of a meeting that united the ruler to his Kshatriya people. The flag had been expressly designed in 1931 to foster a sense of nationhood. A princely order noted that though there had been a ‘royal flag’ (raj pataka) and different military flags in Tripura, ‘since there was no flag suitable for use by the common people (sarvasadharan), there was nothing in the form of a national flag (jatiya pataka) ’. A new national flag emerged to fill this vacuum, for use in offices, schools and by the people at large.60 It would prove to be a rallying point, a symbol of ‘the nation’s independence’ (desher svadhinata), during the Second World War, as Tripura’s soldiers fought against invading Japanese forces in the India-Burma frontier.61 Later, the flag occupied pride of place and was flown alongside India’s national flag on 15 August 1947.62 In the use of the flag in the Kshatriya Samaj ceremonies we witness a duality. On the one hand, through the nazr-khilat transaction, the ruler shared his sovereignty with local chiefs, as his ancestors had done in ages past. On the other hand, a new sense of nationhood also emerged through Kshatriya semantics. Kshatra, sovereignty, acquired a national valence, even as it entrenched

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the power of the monarch over his people. The durbar proceedings of 1932 underline how, on seeing these ceremonies, and especially the national flag, people were reminded of ‘the holy and indivisible union that has always existed between the lord of the state and the hill sardars of ancient Tripura’.63 The prince, on his part, observed that ‘the people’ (prakrti punja) of Tripura would rise ‘to new life’ around this ‘sacred flag’: the striking expression prakrti punja rooted the nation within a primordial order of nature. The durbar proceedings also compared the march of the Tripur Kshatriyas with the national flag to the state’s ancient ‘war campaigns’. A kind of Tripuri national kingship was finally constituted through various forms of popular acclamation directed at the ruler and the flag: jayadhvani, proclamation of victory; puramahilaganer uludhvani, ululations made by city women; samaveta vyaktivrnder ananda kolahal, joyous noises made by assembled people.64

The Kshatriya movement in Tripura was embedded in a massive programme of social engineering. In part, this involved a Hinduisation of the ‘tribal’ populace to draw them closer into the orbit of Tripura’s Hindu kingship. As Kshatriyas, they had to take the sacred thread and reformulate their birth and death rituals. Provided with sanads (charters) and assistants, Brahmins were sent out to offer religious initiation to the people. The state wished to decrease the influence of non-Brahmin Vaishnavas and ascetics. It prohibited Vaishnava practices of non-marital sexual companionship, on the assumption that these encouraged immorality, did not lead to birth of children and inhibited the growth of a productive population. (Indrani Chatterjee has argued that the 1920s and 1930s saw a revival of Vaishnavism across north-eastern India, as well as attempts by various state authorities to control or suppress these: what happened in Tripura was part of a bigger trend.65) The Kshatriyaisation campaign also sought to regulate or discourage practices of dowry, alcoholism and waste of money. Instead, it promoted spread of school education, agrarian training and healthcare.66 Clearly, Kshatriyaisation was as much about the construction of a productive Tripuri national populace as about the reconstruction of sovereignty in the state. Historians have shown in some detail, albeit from a political-administrative rather than intellectual history perspective, the new governmental techniques through which this Kshatriyaisation was carried out, in parallel with a broader reconstitution of the relationship between the royal centre and the ‘tribal’ spaces of community rule in Tripura. Across the 1930s, older modes of community

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self-rule were refashioned to provide the basis for modern local self-government. Hill villages (parvatya palli) were thus grouped into mandals, with a samiti or assembly in charge of social issues pertaining to a mandal. The kendriya sabha took care of matters that transcended the scope of a specific mandal; three such sabhas were ordained, with separate territorial charges. Significantly, decisions in the samitis and the sabhas depended on the opinion of the majority. By the 1940s, the state had also put in motion a broader architecture of representative government, from village mandalis – elected by villagers and entrusted with powers over police, justice, taxes, education, industry, agriculture, civic services, health and employment – to an apex vyavasthapak sabha or legislative assembly comprising elected as well as nominated members. Tax-paying men as well as women were given voting rights.67

Though this architecture of representative government was never completely achieved in practice (in part due to the Second World War, followed by India’s independence), nevertheless, it ideologically redefined the body politic. The state, or even the Tripuri nation, was now seen as comprising the ruler and the people united to govern the land through representative leaders. The sardar embodied the old community leader as well as the new elected politician: he represented the earlier segmentary political system and the newer (semi) democratic state apparatus. Bir Bikram Kishore thus addressed the Mandali sardars in 1939: Having been elected (nirvachita) by the people (janasadharan) of your Mandalis, I am happy that you have been appointed (niyukta) as sardars by my durbar. […] You have today become courtiers (darbaris) in the royal durbar; you have today become a limb (anga) of the government of the state (rajya), and have thus been glorified. […] I hope and believe that you will always perform your duties bearing in mind the progress (unnati), happiness, and comfort of the ruler, the subjects, and the state. When you move in my durbar, always remember that you yourselves are the true representatives (pratinidhi) of your Mandalis, and it is through you that the relation between the ruler and the subjects will be maintained. To attempt to strengthen this relation should be my and your and our aim.68

This was a self-conscious bid to create a modern state driven by an ideology of development. In this discourse, the Tripur Kshatriya now possessed two bodies: one engaged in a vertical relationship with the paternalist ruler and the other in a horizontal relationship with the nation. In a sense, the Kshatriya body marked a schizophrenic sovereignty: it proclaimed both the sovereignty of

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the ruler and the democratic aspiration of the citizen. The resulting paradoxes were further visible in a proclamation Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya made in 1939 to announce the formation of new institutions like the rajsabha or Privy Council, sarvochcha dharmadhikaran or High Court, vyavasthapak sabha, gramya mandali and mantri parishat: […] we have tried our best to bring about the holistic development (unnati) of our son-like subjects through the spread of education and constructive measures, to encourage them in self-reliance, cooperation, love of the state (rashtranuraga) and other similar virtues of the ideal citizen (adarsha nagarika); and since for the welfare of the people of the kingdom, and for fulfilling as far as possible their natural interior wishes and aspirations brought about by the influence of the spirit of the age (yugadharma prabhavajata), it is our earnest desire to involve the common subjects (prajasadharan) to a greater extent in present administration […]. It is our prayer, through body, mind, and words, to the feet of the all-powerful God that from now on, in this kingdom, the eternal bond of love (chirapritisamvandha) between the ruler and the subject will become stronger and sweeter in a new life. And through the assembled efforts of everyone, the ancient glory of this very old kingdom will again be re-established everywhere. This glory is not merely the fame of victory of ancient times of a kingdom expert in the skills of war. It is regulated (anushasita) by the well-balanced harmony of ancient national culture (deshaja sanskrti) and modern ways of thought (adhunika bhavadhara); it is everywhere invincible with the strength of the happiness, prosperity, and contentment of the subject; it is the ever-desired new pride of a modern state (adhunika rashtra).69

In Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya’s eyes, the ideology of ‘modern’ sovereignty thus entailed devolving powers to local community chiefs and leaders, and simultaneously centralising a segmented society to bring local communities within the ambit of princely power. As visible in a princely order of 1938, Bir Bikram was also inspired by the Government of India Act of 1935, by the transformations wrought by Indian ministries in various provinces and by the general growth of ‘self-government’ (svayatvashasan) in British India. Tripura had to reform itself, he argued, in line with these reforms which were ‘suited to the times’ (samayopayogi); otherwise its administration would become ‘unsuited to the times’ (samaya-anupayogi). A clear sense of historicity moulded the temporal pace of the reforms.70 The pace of reform was also accelerated by the growth, across the late 1930s and 1940s, of Congress left-nationalism

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and Communist radicalism, within Tripura and across India.71 There were autonomous popular upsurges too: especially significant was the Reang Rebellion (1943–45) which, Harihar Bhattacharyya observes, ‘virtually broke down princely autocracy in large parts of the state’.72

In response to such challenges, Bir Bikram relied ever more on a monarchically-directed Tripuri nationalist politics; this culminated in the emergence of the Tripur Sangha movement in the 1940s. A fascinating flashpoint was reached in 1946 in the course of a royally-organized feast. Public feasting had for centuries provided a significant tool of state formation in Tripura, bonding the rulers with their martial-peasant subjects. Kaliprasanna Sen further notes that the rulers would traditionally invite hill people and their sardars to a feast called hasambhojan, held annually on Vijaya Dashami, the climactic day in the autumnal worship of the warrior goddess Durga. Their aim was to neutralise the hill peoples, and especially Kukis and Halams, who would launch military campaigns on that day: to ensure that their energies were directed for the benefit of, and not against, Tripura’s monarchy. Further, and into the twentieth century, these feasts allowed the people to inform the ruler about their social, economic and political problems, demands and hopes. The feast ensured a certain egalitarian presence too, in the sense that hasam (literally, army) encompassed the hill people as a whole: ‘in those times, the hill people were all warriors, and if the need arose, were all obliged to enter the battlefield for the welfare of the motherland. Hence no class among them was excluded in the hasambhojan.’73 In 1946, Bir Bikram redeployed this tool of public feasting to crystallise his Tripur Sangha: he organized a bhojasabha in Agartala to which all hill sardars and volunteers from the local mandalis were invited. The aim was to mobilise support for the monarchic nation and to corner the alternative strands of left-democratic politics which were gathering strength in Tripura in the 1940s. But, as Dasarath Deb graphically recalls in his memoirs, these left-democratic political actors – especially those of Tripuri origin, like Sudhannya Deb Barma, Hemanta Deb Barma and Amarendra Deb Barma – infiltrated the camps of the hill sardars and volunteers, spreading their political message. They worked under the umbrella of the Janashiksha Samiti: a Communist-backed movement founded in 1945, which exceeded its ostensible brief of spreading school education and became an important organ of broad-based democratic politics in the state. The prince arrested the three leaders, but later released them under pressure from

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the hill sardars and volunteers. The Tripur Sangha eventually declined after Bir Bikram’s death in 1947.74 Creating a Tripur Kshatriya nation by linking the ruler with the hill sardars and people was thus clearly a double-edged weapon: if this strengthened a unified polity, it also enabled the constituents of that polity to strike back at the royal centre. In mid-twentieth-century Tripura, democratic politics ultimately arose through the imbrications between modern socialist-inflected campaigns and the older segmentary politics of the ‘tribal’/ hill communities, operating in convergence with each other, and in dialectical relation to a centralising kingship which desired to integrate them within the structure of Tripuri royal-national sovereignty. In the late 1940s, the Tripur Kshatriyas faced a powerful new challenge. Since the late-nineteenth century (and, in fact, from even earlier), Tripura’s rulers had favoured the immigration of high-caste Hindu Bengalis, to man the state’s everexpanding administration and service sector, as well as of Muslim and Hindu Bengali peasants who practised settled agriculture: the state considered this more fiscally lucrative than the shifting cultivation which ‘tribal’ communities traditionally practised. But from the late 1940s, immigration reached radically new heights as Bengali Hindus fled from sectarian violence in eastern Bengal (part of Pakistan after 1947). Between 1951 and 1961, the population of Tripura increased by 78.71 per cent, largely due to ‘the influx of refugees from East Pakistan’; between 1947 and 1971, ‘6,09,998 displaced persons migrated here’.75 Consequently, large sections of Tripura’s indigenous communities interpreted the independence of India and the demise of the princely order as signalling the advent of Bengali hegemony over their state. As Congress leader Tarit Mohan Das Gupta recalled, Tripuris and allied groups like Jamatias and Noatias ‘were so bound to royal rule by feelings of kinship (atmiyata) that in the demand for a democratic system of government at that time, they saw a conspiracy of Bengali self-interest in the garb of the Congress’.76 In response, some members of the princely elite formed the Bir Bikram Tripur Sangha, and its associated Cheng Crak or Sengkrak militia, to fight against Bengali immigration: however this aggressively communitarian and militant form of Tripuri nationalism proved short-lived.77

Communist politics provided space for a more durable, and indeed capaciously democratic, Tripur Kshatriya resistance to Bengali dominance. Dasarath Deb’s memoirs – when read together with other accounts of midtwentieth-century Tripura – offer striking records about the intellectual-political

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debates which made possible the remarkable convergence of Tripur Kshatriya and Communist politics. Deb recalls how Aghore Deb Barma, as the General Secretary of the Tripura Rajya Ganamukti Parishad – a Communist-backed political movement which emerged in the late 1940s – hesitated in involving the sardars, on the assumption that they were excessively loyal to the ruler of Tripura. In contrast, Dasarath Deb, as the President of the Parishad, suggested that the enmity felt by the royalist Tripur Kshatriya Mandal leaders towards the Congress – since the Congress had destroyed Tripura’s monarchy – should be harnessed for left politics. For him, the ‘tribal’ hostility to Bengali hegemony could be channelised to support a wider left-democratic resistance to the Congress regime which, in Tripura, seemed to embody the power of Bengali capitalists, moneylenders and landholders. This view won the debate. Accordingly, every unit of the Tripur Kshatriya Mandal provided the basis for the new unit committees of the Mukti Parishad. For initial membership, financial support and popular political propaganda, the Parishad heavily depended on the Kshatriya sardars. Kshatriya Mandal meetings and local religious festivals provided sites for anti-Congress mobilisation. Anger against the Congressdominated postcolonial Indian government and frustration about Bengali power provided political fuel for an explosive wave of left-democratic radicalism. Dasarath Deb became a charismatic icon of this intersection, and, for some parts of the local population, even a substitute king: he was locally known as raja and often honoured with kingly reverence and even ritualised worship. From around 1949, the Mukti Parishad assumed much of the social authority wielded earlier by the Tripur Kshatriya Mandal, becoming its substitute in local social governance. By combining this tradition of local self-governance with an anti-state leftist political programme, and simultaneously fighting against the violence perpetrated on the ‘tribal’ people by the Indian army and police, the Parishad constituted itself in the ‘tribal’ areas of Tripura almost as a parallel government. This looked especially after agrarian issues and civil and criminal conflicts among the people, who were discouraged from going to the state’s courts and offices. In 1949–50, the Parishad provided the ground for the emergence of the Tripura branch of the Communist Party of India. After a while of underground existence, living under and resisting the ban of the Indian state, and a longer period of political struggle against the state and the Congress, the Communists were finally voted to power in Tripura in 1978, remained in office till 1988, re-achieved power in 1993 and have continued to constitute the

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government in the state since then. While in its initial phase, this Communist movement drew on the intersections of ‘tribal’ and Communist political goals, gradually, in view of the demographic transformations in the state, it has also had to depend on the support of common Bengalis, who form the majority of the population in Tripura today. Nevertheless, their agenda of governance – at least in rhetoric, if not always adequately in political reality – continues to give central significance to the political, socio-economic and cultural autonomy of Tripura’s indigenous population.78 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these intersections of Tripuri and Communist politics also enabled new techniques of fighting against certain aspects of patriarchy. As Risley, among others, had observed, gender relations among Tripuris were generally more symmetrical than among Brahmanical communities: this included the general prevalence of adult-marriage, possibilities of widow remarriage and right of women to divorce their husbands, as well as ‘great freedom of intercourse […] between the sexes’.79 In his memoirs, Dasarath Deb conceptualised the Mukti Parishad’s role in transforming gender relations in terms of building on these Tripuri frameworks, while making these social relations even more favourable to women. For example, not only were the practices of widow-remarriage and of second marriage of women countenanced, but, in the latter case, former husbands were made responsible for financially helping their ex-wives until the latter remarried. Similarly, practices of wifebeating and witch-hunt were strictly forbidden, while adult marriage of women was even more strongly enjoined.80 Moreover, some of the leading figures of Tripuri left-democratic politics and militancy in this phase were women, such as Kiran Mala Deb Barma, Nabalakshmi Deb Barma, Biraja Deb Barma and Nandarani Deb Barma. A Tripura Ganatantrik Nari Samiti (Tripura Democratic Women’s Association) was also formed.81 A comparable intersectionality was visible in the Mukti Parishad’s attitudes towards communitarian hierarchies. Figures like Dasarath Deb offered a selfconscious Tripuri ‘tribal’ critique of the Brahmanical Hinduisation which was foisted by Tripura’s rulers on their subjects. In conceptual terms, a critique of Brahmanical Hinduism was inseparable from a critique of social and political hierarchies in the state. Dasarath Deb wrote in 1975: Behind these actions of the ruler [Bir Bikram], there were some hidden political aims. First, through the help of Brahmins who had been given sanads, to bring the tribal people (upajati janagan) slowly within the rules

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of Hinduism, that is , within the rules of the Brahmins. In simple words, to ideologically strengthen the foundation of feudalism (samantatantra). Second, to destroy the autonomous national feeling of the tribals (upajatiyader svatantra jatiyatabodha) and their revolutionary character, and to slowly move them towards Bengalization (bangalikaran).82

If these remarks of later years, and similar remarks in his history of the Mukti Parishad,83 can be assumed to reflect his intellectual temperament in the late 1940s and early 1950s as well, then one may argue that a political sensibility of autonomous, and strongly anti-Brahmanical, Tripuri ‘tribal’-national identity fostered early left-democratic politics in Tripura. In parallel, as Dasarath Deb again recalled, the Mukti Parishad also critiqued hierarchies present within Tripuri society itself, and which had traditionally entrenched Tripuri power over other ‘tribal’ communities and over lower caste Hindus.84

The conversations between Tripuri and Communist political forms were thus dialogically fecund: they helped to diminish various social hierarchies within Tripuri society itself, even as they also extended left-democratic politics beyond elite orbits and strengthened this politics by drawing on Tripuri political concepts and social attitudes. I would further suggest that behind these entanglements between Tripuri and left-democratic reformism, there lay a deeper kinship: a connection between a communitarian and polycentric system of power which had partially survived colonially-aided monarchisation and Brahmanisation, and a Western-origin democratic-socialist rights-consciousness. A leftdemocratic – and eventually Communist – uprising against the Indian state in early postcolonial Tripura was rendered possible because of prior ideas of moral rulership and political community between the ruler and the ruled which had for long prevailed in Tripura. In veteran Congress politician Tarit Mohan Das Gupta’s words, there had been ‘an unwritten constitution (alikhita samvidhan) centring on the ruler’ in Tripura; the ‘deep thread of kinship’ (gabhir atmiyatar sutra) which bound the ruler to the Tripur Samaj gave an affective articulation of this connection.85 Tripuri ‘royalism’ was thus, in part, a strategic technique to assert an ideology of kinship and mutual obligation between ruler and ruled. When this reciprocal relation was felt to be violated, as in the state feast of 1946, the Tripuri sardars could, often with success, register their protest. I would argue that Communist politics eventually reinforced this political ethos, in the sense that it further strengthened the idea that the state should work for the welfare of all sections of the population and not just on behalf of the privileged.

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Of course, even when the Communists gained political power, they could not convince all sections of Tripura’s indigenous population that their hopes and grievances could indeed be adequately addressed within the framework of the Indian state. A militant insurgency grew over the decades in the state, directed against the Indian state and against the Bengali settlers.86 Though this insurgency has shown signs of decline in recent years, political frustration with the Indian state continues to reinforce the belief among many that the old princely epoch had been a golden age of freedom and power for Tripura’s ‘tribal’ populace. In a poignant essay, R. K. Debbarma thus draws attention to Tripuri perceptions about a particular cemetery (simlang) of Tripura’s rulers in Agartala, in order to reflect more widely on the manner in which many Tripuris relate the demise of the princely dynasty to the demise of the indigenous nationhood of the local people: The dissolution of Manikya dynasty and the disruption of British-India, and the immigration of Bengalee-Hindu refugees into Tripura and accession into Indian dominion are conceptualised as events which coincide with the loss of a geography. The simlang is a powerful reminder of this loss — a reminder not only of a glorious past, but also of suppressed present. The simlang is a signifier of ‘glorious’ history of Tripuri people and its crumbling edifices as a signifier of the suppressed present. The desecrated simlang is used as a site to invoke an event in the immediate past — the crossing of the border by Bengalee-Hindus — as a colonising event. The ruin communicates the arrival of the ‘other-outsider’, the ‘refugees’, and announces the disjunction of a geography.87

To transform Kantorowicz’s notion of the immortal and sovereign body of the king: a lament for the abandoned bodies of dead kings thus becomes a dirge about the dead sovereignty of a whole people. In part, this is of course sheer nostalgia for a golden age that had never existed. However, I would argue that it also embodies, in a complex way, an affective reflection about a certain meeting point: about a crossroads between a modern aspiration for self-government and an older tradition of community autonomy. Taking a cue from Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya’s proclamation of 1939, I would suggest that in Tripura (and perhaps elsewhere too), sovereignty in the modern state (adhunika rashtra), and especially in the nation-state, emerges through combative conversations between paternalist rulership, subjecthood and top-down welfareoriented ‘developmentalism’ (unnati, samskara) on the one hand, and citizenship,

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democratic devolution of authority and cooperative self-government on the other. The polyvalent grammar of kshatra helps us observe and theoretically reflect on these dialogues between centralised sovereignty and decentralised devolution of power, and between older structures and memories of collectivecorporate authority and newer contours of democratic politics. Such crossroads have shaped the very emergence, and indeed future possibilities, of modern nation-state sovereignty, in Tripura, South Asia and beyond. As for the democratic possibilities generated by such crossings, in Tripura, as elsewhere, there is both much to lament for and much to keep hope and faith about. The political valence of regal memory – to talk about dead kings – lies in more than nostalgia. Even as it channels identitarian violence and militancy, and precipitates much chauvinism and suffering, it nevertheless also often acts as a motor for urging on the radicalisation of democracy.

4.4 Case study II: Rajavamshis of northern Bengal This section focuses on peasant groups who have gradually assumed the identity of ‘Rajavamshi’ (also Anglicised as Rajbansi), a name which literally means ‘those belonging to the royal dynasty/lineage’. Like ‘Rajput’ and ‘Maratha’, ‘Rajavamshi’ was initially an inclusive status group which encompassed various upwardly mobile peasant lineages with proximity to political power. (However, in the late colonial era, Rajavamshis often tried to project themselves as members of an exclusive ‘caste’.) H. H. Risley noted that: […] the title Rajbansi serves much the same purpose for the lower strata of the Hindu population of Northern Bengal as the title Rajput does for the landholding classes of dubious origin all over India. The one term, like the other, serves as the sonorous designation of a large and heterogeneous group bound together by the common desire of social distinction. […] Only the recruits of the one [Rajput] are drawn from the landholders; of the other [Rajbansi] from the cultivating classes.88 In spite of their pretentions to be Kshatriyas, the social status of the Rajbansi is still extremely low, and no well-known caste will take cooked food from their hands or smoke in their hookahs. […] The caste as a whole may be described as agricultural, though many […] make their living as fishermen, and carpenters, blacksmiths, jewellers, and money-lenders are also found among them. Most Rajbansis, however, are cultivating ryots with or without

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occupancy rights, some are landless day-labourers paid in cash or kind, and others hold their fields as adhiars or métayers, paying half the produce to their immediate landlord.89

Modern Rajavamshi politics is embedded in histories and memories of state formation in the sub-Himalayan frontier regions of northern Bengal and adjoining parts of Assam: the Kamata and the Koch kingdoms have been particularly important in structuring the community’s identity. The Kamata kingdom, which lends its name to the present-day Kamtapur movement among the Rajavamshis, flourished between the late-thirteenth century and the 1490s.90 Local legends – as enunciated in a written form, for example, by Radhakrishna Das’s Gosanimangal (1823–24) – ascribe its founding to a cowherd who received the grace of the goddess Chandi.91 The tradition shares this narrative template with (and indeed occasionally intertextually recalls) other early modern Bengali legends about state formation. Gosanimangal thus cites the Chandimangal story (retold in various versions between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries) of the rise to kingly power of the hunter Kalketu, while explaining the manner in which individuals could become rulers.92 Obviously, such myths embodied longue durée memories of how martial-peasant, pastoral and forest-dependent groups rose to power in early modern Bengal, and indeed played a leading role in local state formation, especially in frontier zones.

Following the demise of the Kamata polity, the next major power in the region was the Koch kingdom: it has given its name to the princely state (and later district in postcolonial West Bengal) of Cooch Behar (alternatively spelt, Koch Bihar) as well as to the contemporary Greater Cooch Behar political movement. Like the Kamata polity, it was also established – in the end-fifteenth/ early-sixteenth century – by a local lineage.93 In the late-sixteenth-century Akbarnama of the Mughal courtier Abul Fazl, in Koch chronicles, and in Gosanimangal, the origin of the dynasty is traced to the god Shiva.94 The legend of Shiva as the progenitor of the Koches soon got a pan-Bengal traction. Thus, from the seventeenth century, the Shivamangal or Shivayan narrative genre described Shiva as a peasant god who engaged in sexual intercourse with Koch women. The most celebrated example of this genre, by Rameshvar (composed sometime between 1735 and 1750), described how Shiva went to the ‘city/citystate’ (nagara) of the Koches, ostensibly ‘to cultivate crops’ (chash chashite), but instead ensured that ‘all the Koch women became flowering gardens’ (kochini sakal haila kusuma udyan).95 The Shivayan tradition transparently associates

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Shiva with early modern processes of peasantisation, urbanisation and state formation in the Koch kingdom and links agrarian fertility to demographic growth in the polity. In the tradition recorded by Risley in the late-nineteenth century, Rajavamshis as a whole had come to be seen as Shiva’s heirs: ‘the Rajbansi […] call themselves Sivbansi [Shivavamshi, of Shiva’s lineage] with reference to the legend which traces their origin to a liaison between the God Siva and Hira, the daughter of Haju, chief of the Kochh tribe.’96 Shiva’s stately presence was ubiquitous in early-twentieth-century Cooch Behar. There were ‘temples of Siva all over the country, all maintained by the State; here the people offer pujas and presents all round the year’.97 Today, Shiva and Chandi are the principal divine icons for Rajavamshi politics: their divine sovereignty inspires contemporary Rajavamshi claims to political autonomy. The Koch kingdom reached its height of power across northern Bengal and western Assam in the sixteenth century, under King Naranarayan and his brother Prince Chilarai. They constructed what is perhaps the most famous temple to the Goddess in India, the Kamakhya temple in Assam: a shrine which, like the Koch lineage itself, combined local and Brahmanical modes of piety and majesty to create a powerful statement about the association of divinity with kingship.98 Based on evidence gathered from early modern Sanskrit and Bengali texts – such as Bhramari Tantra, Kamteshvara Kulakarika, and the writings of the late-eighteenth-century poet Rati Ram Das – and the observations of colonial ethnographers like Francis Buchanan (1807–14), Rajavamshi intellectuals as well as later historians have concluded that the Rajavamshi identity emerged in relation to Kamata-Koch state formation, which brought political power to diverse local armed pioneer-peasant groups.99

In the colonial era, Rajavamshis lived in northern districts of British Bengal, princely Cooch Behar, and adjacent parts of Bihar and Assam. They were mainly a peasant community, with a politically articulate upper stratum which claimed Kshatriya ancestry for the community as a whole, while carefully demarcating themselves from other less Sanskritised groups. The legend of (Vishnu’s avatara) Parashurama’s persecution of Kshatriyas was often used to explain the present ‘fallen Kshatriya’ status of the Rajavamshis. From the late-nineteenth century, in British Bengal as well as princely Cooch Behar, they faced a significant threat from immigrant high-caste Bengalis, and, to a lesser extent, from ‘Marwaris’ or trading groups of northern Indian ancestry. On the basis of their Western education and their growing control of state power, modern professions and

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trade, as well as by adroitly deploying caste hierarchies, these high-caste immigrants rapidly inferiorised the local peasant communities, displacing them even from control over land, apart from politically marginalising them. In 1911, in ‘the Rajshahi division, which contained the major concentration of this caste [Rajavamshi] population, they constituted only 10.68 per cent of the rent-receivers, while the representation of the Brahmins in this category amounted to 25.26 per cent’.100 The Rajavamshi response was visible in the formation of the Rangpur Bratya Kshatriya Jatir Unnati Bidhayani Sabha in the 1890s; from 1910, the Kshatriya Samiti became the prime organ for their politics. In contrast to Swaraj Basu, who has written the most authoritative social and political history of the movement,101 I offer here a brief intellectual history of the Kshatriya Samiti.

The members of the Samiti were (in the words of a government report from 1912) ‘generally middle class Jotedars’.102 In the early 1920s, beside peasant landholders/jotedars, there were lawyers, zamindars and a doctor as well in the Samiti.103 Despite their basis in peasant elites, Samiti leaders seem to have gained a significant amount of recognition among common Rajavamshi villagers.104 By the 1920s, the Samiti was considered ‘representative’ of the Rajavamshi community by the Government of Bengal; the Samiti’s progovernment stance facilitated such recognition.105 One of the Samiti’s initial aims was for Rajavamshis to be categorised as Kshatriyas in the colonial censuses, leading to what the British regarded as ‘most persistent agitation’106 which spread ‘each time farther into the uneducated masses’.107 The Samiti also sought to distinguish Rajavamshis from neighbouring peasant and ‘tribal’ communities and identity markers, such as that of the ‘Koch’.108 In pursuit of their aims, Samiti members forged political and cultural links with emerging pan-Indian ‘Kshatriya’ associations and conferences and their princely leaders, including the rulers of Alwar, Sailana and Indore. Through pilgrimages to towns like Mathura and Brindavan, they integrated themselves to the sacred geography of a Hindu-Kshatriya India.109 Nevertheless, Rajavamshis remained inferiorised and discriminated against by high-caste Hindus. Such considerations, including the ritual ban on their entry into Jagannath Temple in Puri (regarded by B. R. Ambedkar as a marker of their ‘untouchability’) and their low literacy (5.8 per cent according to the 1931 Census), persuaded the British to include them in the final list of Scheduled Castes of Bengal in 1933.110 The First World War opened up a striking opportunity for Rajavamshis

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to assert their Kshatriya status. As is well-known, British military recruitment policies in India were heavily dependent on colonial racialised categories which differentiated between ‘martial races’ and more ‘effete’ peoples. Bengalis were generally placed firmly in the latter category.111 (Bengali reluctance to join the colonial army, in fact, often had a more material rationale: even in the earlytwentieth century, an average native sepoy earned less than an average Bengali peasant or labourer and also less than one-third of a similarly-placed European recruited from India. Peasant incomes were lower elsewhere in India, and correspondingly, the job of a sepoy more attractive.) In the 1910s, anti-colonial political sentiment also inhibited many Bengalis from joining the army. In reaction to the war, as well as to promote political loyalism in Bengal, the Government of Bengal sought to drastically change this situation, by recruiting more Bengalis and indeed forming a Bengali Regiment. The Governor of Bengal, in communication with the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, engaged in this project. A Provincial Recruitment Board was formed in 1917 and the Rajavamshis were among the target groups. The Army authorities were markedly less enthusiastic though about recruiting Bengalis, finding most of them unfit for service; the recruits themselves often wanted to leave the army after the end of the war.112

The Kshatriya Samiti’s response to the British recruitment drive, for example that initiated by the Commissioner of Rajshahi Division in 1917, was however unreservedly positive. Samiti members argued that the war fostered Kshatriya tej (fiery energy) among the recruits as well as among Rajavamshis at large, and that death in war guaranteed immortality and paradise. The Samiti encouraged recruitment by distributing food and medicines and composing war songs; it published laudatory reports of Rajavamshi recruits who fought in Mesopotamia, Egypt, France and Belgium. Representative is this Samiti report from 1919 which vividly related the rural landscapes of northern Bengal and western Assam to the distant fields of war in Mesopotamia: Some are leaving their mortal bodies in the battlefield and are going to the land of immortality or the divine land with their immortal life and divine light. Some are receiving wounds from weapons, and their holy bodies are now bereft of sin. Vivified by holy fiery energy, they are sanctifying society through that fiery energy. Chandramohan Simha of Jamduar village of Dhubri, who received wounds from weapons during the rescue of Kut, and Ramchandra Simha of Bangaigaon of the same district, who received

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wounds from weapons during the attack on Baghdad after the siege of Kut, have brought the holy Kshatriya fiery energy (punyakshatratejah) created by wounds caused by weapons and have spread it across different parts of Dinajpur.113

1,100–1,200 Rajavamshis are estimated to have joined the army, though many never saw action and remained in training camps.114 To spike up the recruitment, the Samiti cast the Great War as a dharmayuddha, righteous war, and nyayayuddha, just war, to be fought for bhavesha (Lord of the Earth, i.e., God) and for naresha (Lord of Human Beings, i.e., the King-Emperor). The Samiti urged women to inspire their sons and husbands to join the fight. New liturgical practices were evolved, whereby mothers of soldiers were worshipped as virajanani (‘mother of warrior’). The war was also physically re-enacted in the countryside of northern Bengal and Assam, through ritualised parades in military dress. The King-Emperor’s rulership was reconstituted and indigenised through victory acclamations (jayadhvani, vijaya mahollasa); he was praised for not only giving Rajavamshis an opportunity to prove their Kshatriya manhood, but also for protecting his subjects and for extending the benefits to them of the press and of Western education. Dead soldiers, and the Kshatriya spirit in general, also received ritualised worship.115 Representative is the following ceremony from June 1919, where Rajavamshis, including soldiers who had returned from the war, re-enacted the military triumph in the district town of Rangpur. Noteworthy is how they asserted their authority in the main spaces of power in the town, while linking their own power to that of the British monarch: At 1 pm, the Kshatriyas dressed up and met in a huge procession. The blower of the conch shell walked ahead while blowing the conch shell. Then radiantly dressed and marked self-motivated volunteers, while singing songs of the self (atmagatha); then Kshatriya soldiers (sainyadal) dressed in war discipline, marching with regular steps; then again, the above-mentioned self-motivated volunteers; then other innumerable Kshatriyas. Thus united and dressed, the great Kshatriya militia joined the songs of the volunteers who had gone ahead, and walked while making the horizons resound with victory acclamations (jayadhvani) of “Victory to the Kshatriya, Victory” (jaya Kshatriyer jaya), and “Victory to George V, Victory” (jaya pancham Georger jaya). They walked from the office of the Kshatriya Samiti through the market, the neighbourhood of the gomastas, the neighbourhood of the scribes,

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and the court into the Town Hall, the site of the meeting. The Kshatriyas in front of the Town Hall welcomed them with victory acclamations and took them inside.116

In contrast, Rajavamshi efforts to build bridges with the Cooch Behar kingship turned out to be less felicitous. They professed rajbhakti for the prince and hoped that they would be offered jobs in the state. In 1912, they were assured by the Superintendent of Cooch Behar, A. W. Dentith, that ‘His Highness will always be ready to give employment in his state to his subjects, when vacancies occur, should they be duly qualified.’ But following the ruler Rajendra Narayan’s death (in 1913) and Dentith’s retirement, the promise was not fulfilled.117 If anything, Rajavamshis felt, not unjustifiably, that the high-caste Bengalis in the princely administration were actively hostile to their efforts at gaining social mobility and political representation.118 In 1926, after a conflict with the Maharani Regent during the minority of Jagaddipendra Narayan, Panchanan Barma was expelled from Cooch Behar.119

Despite their professions of royalism, Rajavamshis were keen to emphasise the merits of representative government. Following Secretary of State for India Montagu’s August Declaration of 1917, and in the prelude to the Government of India Act of 1919, the Samiti wished for communities like theirs – and not just high-caste Indian elites – to be the beneficiaries of any devolution of powers. Panchanan Barma, as Secretary of the Kshatriya Samiti, thus wrote in November 1917 to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal that the ‘Kshatriya Community,’ as a part of Hindu society, had always been ‘internally governed by small Samajas or Societies each with its controlling head and a Panchayat or a council composed by the Pramanikas’. These ‘small societies formed parts confederated and combined by love and authority of a higher organization which ordinarily was the state with the Raja or king at its head’; they were ‘self-governing and representative’. Their leaders and the king were ‘under the control of the law and order’. On a somewhat internationalist note, Barma emphasised that these Rajavamshi samajas were ‘loving confederates with all other similar Samajas as also the rest of mankind’. Kshatriya ‘representative system of administration’ was still visible, he argued, in the Kamakhya temple administration. Such invocations of history and sacrality had a present political valence. As already mentioned in the beginning of this volume, the letter urged the British to devolve powers to local ‘self-governing and self-improving Institutions’ to fulfil the Montagu Declaration. ‘Municipal, village Communities

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and Panchayats’ should be ‘established and recognised as units and made the basis of popular representation’. Further, in government councils: representation must be thorough and every community high or low, and every interest should be allowed to be represented by members of their own community and not by men who belong to other community as they may not have identical views and feelings on any subject.

Though the Samiti sought to meet the visiting Montagu (and was politely refused), it had staked its claim, and that of similarly placed non-elite communities, in any future package of political devolution. Rajavamshi actors refused to have their opinions, or that of other subaltern communities, subsumed by Indian elites: in effect, by any masquerade of representation.120 Interestingly,  a contemporaneous Bengali version of the letter translates the word ‘selfgoverning’, with its roots in the Montagu Declaration, as ‘atmashasani’:121 we shall later see the political-theological signification that the term acquired in Rajavamshi discourses.

As part of Kshatriya self-governance, the Rajavamshis also organized their youth in the 1910s into political bodies: their nomenclature – patti (literally, people), gulma (troop of soldiers), senamukha (head army), and gana (people), each stage led by nayakas or leaders – reflected the militant Kshatriya ethos of command.122 The ethos of governance in Bengali militant revolutionary societies may have left a trace: the Rajavamshi leader Upendranath Barman had once been a member of the Anushilan Samiti (he had joined in 1911), while the Anushilan leader Pulinbihari Das and his students were later invited to train Samiti members in armed combat.123 In claiming to be fit for selfgovernment, Rajavamshis ultimately put forward a powerful assertion to being Kshatriya sovereigns. Such perspectives sometimes found Brahmin spokesmen. For example, in 1927, Rajendranath Smrtiratna Goswami, a Brahmin from Nabadwip, the centuries-old epicentre of Sanskritic and Vaishnava learning and devotion in Bengal, supported Rajavamshi claims in a public Kshatriya Samiti meeting. For Smrtiratna, society was bipolar, divided into protectors and protected. As Kshatriyas, Rajavamshis were the protectors, and thus, in a sense, the sovereigns of society, superior even to Brahmins, and equivalent to human gods. While the discourse was cast generally (nara denotes a human being), Kshatriya men, and not women, were primarily expected to act as protectors: Kshatriyahood (kshatriyatva) is about saving (trana) the one in distress,

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thereby protecting (palana) all creatures on earth. This is the life (prana) of the Kshatriya. So another name of the Kshatriya is lokapala (protector of people) or bhupala (protector of the earth). The Brahmin, Vaishya, or Shudra does not have this quality (guna) or this action (karma). However great they may be, they are not the protectors of the other (aparer palana karta nahe). They are the protected (palya); protected by the Kshatriya. The Kshatriya always plays with risk and trouble to save (uddhara) those in distress, and protects all beings. Hence the Kshatriya is a god among human beings, that is, a human god (Kshatriya narer madhye deva arthat naradeva), and the most superior among human beings, the most superior human being (narer madhye shreshtha narashreshtha). Since Kshatriyas are human gods (naradeva), or the most superior human beings, or the best human beings (shreshtha manava), they should be respectfully worshipped by everyone.124 In any country, the country’s people have achieved any kind of progress (unnati) in morality (dharma), or have been able to establish happiness and peace, because they have got shelter (ashraya) from Kshatriyas. Therefore all communities (jati) in the world are indebted to the Kshatriya community. Kshatriyas have protected (pratipalana) Brahmins, Vaishyas, and Shudras, as a father does. They have protected their moral order (dharma); therefore Kshatriyas are known as “dharma pala” (protector of dharma).125

I have translated palana as protection, but it is a more complex term. In Sanskrit and Bengali, palana (and suffixes –pa, -pala, etc.) carries connotations of watching, guarding, protecting, ruling and defending, combining the duties of a ruler, a herdsman and a nourisher. It bears traces of Indo-European etymology with equivalents in ancient Iranian, Greek and Latin.126 Taking a cue from Michel Foucault, one might say that this constitutes the invocation of an ancient Euro-Asian grammar of pastoral governance.127 While Foucault interrogates pastoral governance in the context of church and state authority, Rajavamshi discourse on palana was a more daring assertion of subaltern sovereignty, made by a low-status group. Peasants claimed to be protectors and nourishers, challenging their social inferiorisation. Rajavamshi Kshatriyahood was not merely the claim of being part of a nobility or aristocracy; it was a stronger claim to absolute mastery, to being a collective ruler-protector-sovereign, an assertion made also through the epithets lokapala and bhupala, Indic terms for kings. As Rajendranath noted, the Kshatriya was he ‘who has conquered internal and external enemies, who has possessed both this world and the other world, and has become a master (prabhu) without enemies’.128 Significantly, in the

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Hindi version of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, the word ‘sovereign’ is translated as prabhutva-sampanna (possessed of prabhutva or mastery).129 In lower caste discourses, Kshatriyahood thus entailed a collective assertion of rulership, a paradoxical category which used the semantics of singular rulership (raja, lokapala, bhupala) to assert a collective claim, on behalf of the entire community, to being protectors of the people, and therefore their sovereigns: the Kshatriya is the master who has no master above him, he is a god who walks among men. In part, this embodied a modern claim to a stake in sovereign state power (within the colonial state apparatus); in part, it refashioned an older peasant style of social mobility and assertion of rulership through Kshatriyaisation. For Rajavamshi politicians at any rate, to be a Kshatriya was, tout court, to be a raja/ruler. Upendranath Barman, citing the ancient Indian thesaurus Amarakosha, argued in 1941 that another term for Kshatriya was raja; hence a Rajavamshi was one born in a raja’s or Kshatriya’s lineage.130 Jagat Mohan Devsimha Barman also felt that Kshatriya, rajan, rajanya and raja were synonymous words. Citing the Mahabharata, he suggested that Prthu, the primordial good king and archetype of all future rulers, pleased (ranjan) his subjects and was thus called a raja, bestowing that name on all future rulers. Prthu also destroyed evil-doers, and saved (paritrana) Brahmins from the wound (kshata) caused by obstructions to asceticism; hence he, and future rulers, were called Kshatriya.131 Kshetranath Simha similarly claimed that ‘another name for Kshatriya is rajan or raja’, from which the word Rajavamshi originated.132 In colonial Bengal, peasant and pastoral communities often embedded their claims to rulership in their mastery over cattle, in a (somewhat literal) vision of ‘pastoral governance’. Nabinchandra Ghosh, an ideologue for the pastoral community of Gop-Yadavs, thus equated rajas or Kshatriyas with the gopati (lord of cattle). This argumentation invoked the ancient Vedic understanding of kingship as dependent on control of cattle-wealth, even as it gave the Vedic model a contemporary relevance by grounding it in the claims to political authority asserted by modern pastoral groups.133 Rajavamshis too emphasised proper care for cattle as a way of improving agriculture,134 but this had political-theological implications as well. Thus, a resolution introduced by Mahendranarayan Barma and Nirananda Barma in a 1919 meeting of the Kshatriya Samiti urged: ‘The cow is a god of the Hindus, and should be worshipped. Kshatriyas should make special efforts to take care and protect (palana o rakshana) cows.’ The resolution

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noted how Rajavamshis were dependent on cattle, using them for ploughing the soil, for transportation, for making milk-products and for manure; however cows were sometimes ill-treated, leading to their starvation and death. To prevent the sin of cow-killing, Rajavamshis were asked to ensure the welfare of cattle by properly feeding, housing and treating them. The Samiti unanimously voted for the resolution.135 Such a stance was reinforced by Vaishnava piety which cast the god Vishnu-Krishna as a protector of cattle.136 Rajavamshi claim to being Kshatriya rulers was thus rooted in their agrarian functions, in their selfidentification as being herdsmen of both human beings and animals.

Such grandiose idioms need to be juxtaposed with the incidence of social humiliation and poverty that framed the everyday lives of many, if not most, Rajavamshis. Even the more well-off sections of the community were not immune. A Brahmin lawyer, for example, threw away his ‘toga’ with insults at Panchanan Barma when the latter mistakenly wore it. On another occasion, the food was thrown away (to cows!) when a Rajavamshi boy wandered into a school kitchen.137 To combat this caste discrimination as well as widespread poverty, Rajavamshi intellectuals emphasised the dignity of agrarian labour as the very foundation of (peasant) sovereignty. Nabinchandra Barma, as the sabhapati of a Kshatriya Samiti meeting in 1919, thus observed that the British had become rulers of India through trade, while Marwari traders had similarly become masters and exploiters of the common people. In such circumstances, he felt, to take a mere job was tantamount to slavery (golami). Instead, Rajavamshis should start their own businesses, including joint-stock firms. He invoked Indian, Roman and American images to associate rulership with ploughing and economic-political autarchy: Arya is a common term for the three jatis, Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya. The root word ri means the cultivation/ploughing of land (bhumi-karshan). The word Arya is derived from this root word ri. That is, because the Aryans did agricultural work, so they were named Arya. This clearly shows that agricultural work is not something which deserves hatred. Janaka, the ascetic ruler of Mithila, found Sita while cultivating land. The famous Kuru ruler, born in the lunar dynasty, himself cultivated the sacrificial land. The Roman Emperor Hadrian, and the great Washington and Abraham [Lincoln], Presidents of the United States, did not feel ashamed to work the plough with their own hands. This also proves that agricultural work is not degrading. Eating and clothing are the two best supports (avalambana) of life. They are indispensable as air and water. They are also dependent (nirbhar) on

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agriculture. Kings and great kings, wealthy and poor, alike depend (bharsa) on agriculture. The agricultural work which is so useful for the nation (desha), which is the foundation of the stability of society, without which the world would end in apocalypse, thanks to the times, that agricultural work is hated as a low occupation. It is greatly hated by the Bengali people. Those who live through jobs (chakuri), they sell their honour to others and forget the branch which is their shelter. They cut away at that very branch. They ‘sweetly’ call the peasants (krishak) terms like chasha [a pejorative term], and thereby they insult their own social existence (samajikata). They do not even have the strength to realize the significance of the directly visible truth that the downfall of agriculture or of the peasant is the downfall of the entire society and the entire nation.138

Barma’s association of kingship with ploughing and the earth’s fertility drew on centuries-old Indic beliefs (ritualised also in Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal),139 but was concretely grounded as well in his concern and anger about peasant mortality. The influenza epidemic of 1918–19 had devastated India, leading to 17–18 million deaths, with comparatively higher mortality among the malnourished lower castes and classes.140 In this context, Nabinchandra lamented that the Great War, lack of rainfall, and spread of diseases had aggravated starvation and even suicides among peasants. He felt that the solution lay in better scientific techniques for agricultural development (unnati), as well as in the promotion of a respectful attitude towards peasants.141 A protective and nourishing model of rulership and sovereignty emerged here, rooted in the agrarian nourishment through which the peasant gave refuge (avalambana, nirbhar, bharsa) to society. In Rajavamshi discourses, the ideal sovereign both protected and nourished the people: the Rajavamshi fulfilled both duties, as Kshatriya soldier and as peasant. Upendranath Barman’s celebrated poem ‘Langaler Dabi’ (Demand of the Plough) articulated a comparable model of rulership, endowing the act of ploughing with divine status and ritual honour. Written as part of the election campaign of 1937, the poem observed that the god Shiva had ploughed the land in the Satya Age, to build a garden for the goddess Durga, that the king Janaka had ploughed the land in the Treta Age, leading to the birth of Sita, while (the demi-god) Balarama held the plough in the Dvapara Age. In the present time, the peasants, in ploughing the land, were their worthy heirs. The poem urged peasants to elect politicians who would come from their communities and represent their interests.142 Upendranath Barman thus creatively drew on pan-

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Indian legends (the stories of Janaka and Balarama), on Bengali myths (Shiva as a cultivator in Shivayana), as well as on the Rajavamshi cult of Balarama.143

This campaign for elections to the Bengal provincial legislature came in the wake of a long struggle to achieve legislative representation for the lower castes. The Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, followed by the Government of India Act of 1919, had guaranteed separate electorates for Muslims, ensuring their political representation at provincial and imperial legislatures. In contrast, lower caste Hindus, and especially the Depressed Classes, in Bengal as elsewhere in India, could rarely make their political voice heard: they often did not qualify according to the property criteria for voting rights, and in any case, did not have requisite political muscle, as compared to high-caste Hindus. Across the interwar years, the Depressed Classes, guided by figures like B. R. Ambedkar, forged regional and pan-Indian associations to overcome this scenario. The Rajavamshis worked in close partnership with such translocal organizations: in 1932, Panchanan Barma even became President of a special session of the All-Bengal Depressed Classes Conference. Finally, the British agreed to offer separate electorates to the Depressed Classes through the Communal Award of 1932, but Gandhi insisted that they should not be thus separated off from the Hindu population. The Poona Pact of 1932 ultimately resulted in reserved seats, but not separate electorates, for these communities.144 This had striking ramifications for the Rajavamshis. Beside Panchanan Barma and Nagendra Narayan Roy, who had been elected to the Bengal Legislative Council in the 1920s, could now be placed an array of Rajavamshi politicians who were elected in 1937 to the Bengal Legislative Assembly. They had some success in ensuring state scholarships and job reservations for the lower castes. Interestingly, the two other Depressed Class communities to acquire a prominent place in interwar Bengal politics were also peasant communities: the Namashudras and the Pods or Paundra Kshatriyas.145

Rajavamshi discourses often emphasised the category of unnati (literally, uplift) to encapsulate peasant-Kshatriya hopes of improvement in material life-chances, political status and ethical selfhood. Unnati represented the teleology of the soul as well as of the body. There was an immanentisation of the structure of salvation here, as well as a spiritualisation of the concept of social development, mediated through the patriotic community. A 1913 report of the Kshatriya Samiti stressed that the organization aimed at ‘progress (unnati) related to bodily, mental, social, economic, ethical, and moral order, to save the

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almost lost national (jatiya) glory’.146 Later, emphasising the importance of being ‘developed’ (unnata), Rajendranath suggested in 1927 that ‘the Kshatriya must become a human god (naradeva). […] The Kshatriya must try to be a full renouncer (purnatyagi) and a fully active worker’.147 In this worldview, renunciation did not imply abandoning the world, but rather transforming it through sacrificial work. To be Kshatriya was to instantiate a sovereign work ethic: through ethical work, the world itself was preserved and renewed. Such discourses, when aimed at peasants, could not but ennoble the status of their labour. Rajendranath went to the extent of defining the Kshatriya as ‘the one who works incessantly, the most superior worker, from whose very nature arises bravery, valour, and similar virtues and actions, who is an ever reigning god, a human god (nirantara rajaman devata naradeva)’.148 In the same meeting, Panchanan Barma radicalised this argument further by emphatically arguing that it was the peasant-Kshatriya, and not the Brahmin, who was the true God, the divine avatara: Brother, I have told you that Kshatriyahood (kshatriyatva) itself is God (bhagavan) to me. In fact, brother, Kshatriyahood itself is God. Kshatriyahood and Godhood (bhagavatva) are comparable things. As in Godhood, so in Kshatriyahood, one uses one’s own power (atmashakti) to create, protect, and lord over (ishana) the world. Therefore, when God descends into (avatirna) the world, then he takes birth in a comparable Kshatriya lineage. We often refer to the Brahmin as God, but the Brahmin is actually not God. The Kshatriya is the true God. […] Describing the goal of avatara or birth from age to age, God has said: ‘Whenever dharma suffers in Bharata, and there is a rise in adharma, I am born then, to save the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish dharma, I come again and again.’ […] To achieve these goals, heroism, inner fire (tejah), ability to offer shelter, skill, ability not to run away from war, charity or sacrifice, and divine quality, these virtues are essential. God has to descend (avatirna) on earth with these qualities. Therefore, during his incarnation (avatara), God takes birth in the Kshatriya lineage which has qualities comparable to him. Therefore Krishna is Kshatriya, Ramachandra is Kshatriya, and therefore the quality (guna) of Kshatriyahood is comparable to the quality of Godhood. Therefore Kshatriyahood itself is God. Cultivation (sadhana) of Kshatriyahood is cultivation of God. […] The cultivation of Kshatriyahood is the cultivation of God’s qualities, the cultivation of divine feeling, the cultivation of God.149

Similar ideas of the Kshatriya as a divine avatara were advocated by Rajavamshi ideologues Krishnakanta Barma and Nilkanta Ray in that meeting;

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according to them, this Kshatriyahood had to be consciously cultivated (anushilana).150 The term anushilana reminds us of Bankimchandra’s quest to create an avatara-like ruler-citizen. In elite nationalist as well as lower caste discourses, avatara served as a template for imagining the sovereign citizen.

The (male) Kshatriya’s body needed visible markers. The Samiti insisted that Rajavamshis should wear the sacred thread, which was traditionally reserved for men of the first three varnas, and, in Bengal, mainly for Brahmins. High-caste Hindu elites retaliated by seizing the Samiti’s funds and expropriating the lands of Rajavamshis. Some Brahmins, from Nabadwip as well as Kamarup (Assam) and Mithila (Bihar), however validated the Rajavamshi project.151 To enhance the Kshatriya physique, the Samiti harped on physical education and fitness, healthcare, and measures to ensure proper sanitation and control of diseases. Such projects had an obvious utility in the rural interior of Bengal. Rajavamshis were also trained to ‘defend’ their women from abduction and rape by ‘Muslim’ ruffians.152 Such moves made visible the deterioration of sectarian relations between local Hindus and Muslims; however, as we shall soon see, relations between peasant communities across sectarian borders actually remained pretty strong, allowing for the birth of a trans-sectarian local nationalist politics in the 1940s. The Samiti had a complex appreciation of the role of women in public life. On the one hand, as we have seen, the discourse on Kshatriya masculinity relegated women to the role of ‘mothers of warriors’ (virajanani) and ideal wives. This worked in tandem with broader juridical and social transformations which favoured patriarchisation of Rajavamshi society. As Lucy Carroll has shown, by applying Brahmanically-inflected Hindu Law norms, the colonial judiciary sometimes refused to recognise Rajavamshi customary practices of widow-remarriage and also denied remarried women their traditional property rights.153 However, it would be simplistic to say that the customary freedoms, especially in realms of sexuality, marriage and labour, which Rajavamshi women had traditionally enjoyed – and which nineteenth and early-mid-twentiethcentury ethnographic accounts often spoke about154 – were completely erased by the Brahmanisation projects of the colonial era. Panchanan Barma, for example, focused on rehabilitating victims of rape: an attitude that stood in contrast to the general stigmatisation of such women in high-caste Hindu contexts. In general, women were not only politicised, but also militarised by the Samiti: as Kshatriya women, they learnt how to fight with sticks and

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daggers to defend themselves. The Samiti also gave aid to raped women in their quest for justice through police and the judiciary.155 Further, the Samiti denounced the commodification and degradation of women it saw implicit in the systems of dowry as well as bride-price. Rajavamshis regarded dowry as a particularly alien practice, introduced into Bengal proper (but not Cooch Behar) by the (high-caste Brahmanical) system associated with the twelfth-century king Ballalasena; they feared that, in the twentieth century, some Rajavamshis were getting attracted to this ‘evil’ practice.156 Thanks in part to such critiques, Rajavamshi gender relations retained some of their traditional egalitarian traits. An ethnological report from the 1990s noted that Rajavamshis ‘practise adult marriage’. ‘Divorce and remarriage are socially approved customs for both men and women’.157

Education constituted a crucial element in Rajavamshi self-building, and encompassed training in norms of dharma as well as Western education. Rajavamshis built schools, collected funds for hostels and offered scholarships to community students. Admittedly, education for boys was prioritised over female education.158 The practical effects may have been modest: in 1961, only 12.83 per cent of the Rajavamshi population in northern Bengal were literate, with the figures being 23.12 per cent and 4.01 per cent for men and women, respectively.159 Nevertheless, the implications were quite radical in terms of political subjectivity. Education structured, in a sense, the very heart of interwar Rajavamshi discourses on self-rule. We get a programmatic sense of this from a Kshatriya Samiti report of 1918. The report argued that the ‘world’ (jagat) was originally in a condition of ‘nature’ (prakrti), where everything was in motion; in this state, natural objects, including living creatures, continually clashed against each other. Unregulated, humanity would thus be reduced to a mutually destructive ‘heap of animals’ (jantupunja). To prevent this, an individual or group of individuals implemented ‘coercive regulations or prohibitions’ (balanusrta vidhi ba nishedha), and thus ‘protected’ (raksha) everyone from pain and led them to joy. This was the phase of the ‘rule of the master’ (prabhushasana). The report underlined that such power brought peace and joy, enabling people to enjoy their ‘feeling of unity’ (milanabhava). Hence, one felt respect towards the ‘master’ (prabhu), who was called the ‘ruler’ (raja). The latter felt affection towards people, as if they were his sons; hence the people were called praja.160 The ‘authority of the ruler’ (rajar shasana) prevented conflicts between subjects, resulting in ‘progress’ (unnati). But it could not adequately

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negotiate the feelings of affection and love which held people together through ‘feelings of sociability’ (samajika bhava). To regulate these latter feelings, there emerged ‘social customs or rules’ (samajika achara ba niyama): this constituted the ‘rule of society’ (samajer shasana, samajshasana). But even this stage could not purify people’s feelings; hence was perceived the need for ‘self-rule or selfcontrol’ (atmashasana ba atmasamyama). To achieve this, ‘one has to rule oneself ’ (nije nijake shasana karite haibe); ‘the rule of the outside’ (bahirer shasana) was a ‘servant’ (kinkara) of this self-rule. The report defined shasana/rule as the exercise of exterior force, and shiksha/education as the exercise of interior force. It concluded that in human life and society, shasana had to gradually cede space to shiksha.161

This report offered an evolutionary view of government, from an originary state of nature, through the rule of the master (who allegedly replaced the bestial chaos of nature with the protective order and hierarchy of government) and the rule of society, to self-rule. Deliciously inverting the master-subject hierarchy, the rule of the master was now cast as, in effect, a rule of the servant: a servant, that is, to the rule of the self over itself. I would argue that we can also map this metaphysics of stages of rule into an actual history. For early-mid-twentiethcentury Rajavamshis, prabhushasana or rajar shasana, the rule of the master or the king, was embodied by the colonial state, and especially by the British imperial monarchy and the Cooch Behar kingship. Samajshasana, the rule of society, was organized through the Kshatriya Samiti, including its annual milana mahotsava or ‘great festival of union’;162 the Samiti hoped to unify Rajavamshis through local mandalis into a broader samaj.163 But the Samiti, at least in its discourse, also sought to transcend its own rule. A 1919 Samiti report thus underlined that even when heteronomy, ‘the rule of the other’ (parashasana), was ended and ‘self-rule’ (atmashasana) achieved, one still craved for a greater ‘feeling of freedom’ (muktabhava), a bliss for the soul.164 ‘Atmashakti’, the power of one’s self, was thus essential for freedom,165 but even this government of the self had to be replaced one day by a freedom that erased governance itself. Such discourses had material implications too. Rajavamshis related atmashakti to being atmanirbhara, ‘self-dependent’, interpreted as developing one’s own force, wealth (artha) and intelligence.166 Samiti members like Krishnakanta Barma spoke about the need to remove ‘foreign’ (bhinna deshiyera) power, especially that of immigrant elites who displaced Rajavamshis from land and jobs and seemingly sought to reduce them to an ‘animal-like’ ‘bestial state’ (pashur nyaya, pashubhava).167 From this

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location, governance was a precarious exercise of saving human beings – here, specifically, Rajavamshi peasants – from returning to a bestial state of nature. Self-government was a technique for guarding a porous and volatile border, an attempt to prevent a relapse into the animal that violence and heteronomy constantly threatened to bring about.

Concretely, the Samiti instigated peasants to create and deploy new agricultural and industrial tools and techniques, build businesses and cooperative societies, cultivate cotton and tobacco, and improve animal husbandry. It established a periodical, a Kshatriya Bank and a library. Many of the members were concerned about peasant debts and loss of land, and critiqued those who exploited the poor through their ownership of land and capital. They condemned the economic system whereby merchants and industrialists from afar extracted raw materials and semi-finished products from the people (especially from Rajavamshi peasants), and sold back finished commodities at high prices.168 This did not imply that Rajavamshis wanted the abolition of capital. Rather, the Samiti, dominated as it was by the propertied, by people from a peasant elite background, emphasised the spread of capital among community members. For example, in the course of a heated debate in 1919, Jagadindra Deb Raikat, of the Raikat zamindar lineage, criticised companies for ‘exploiting’ (nishpeshan) the poor by lending money to them at high interest, and, further, by taking away their land, even while converting them into mere labourers. He felt that the ‘labour’ (shram) of the poor was being ‘robbed’ (apaharan) by these companyowners, since the poor got very little share in the ‘profits’ (labh) resulting from their labour. But Rajchandra Barma, the founder of such a company, countered this by arguing that whether the Rajavamshis wanted or not, companies were emerging everywhere. He felt that Rajavamshis, to protect themselves from other more powerful communities, needed to come together in ‘union’ (milana), and form companies; otherwise, their ‘land’ (bhumi) and ‘labour’ (shram) would continue to be appropriated by the rich. Forming companies was the only way to defend Rajavamshis from ‘exploitation by the rich’ (dhani loker nishpeshan), while also ‘training [the poor] in work’ (kaj shiksha). He concluded: ‘We the ones without wealth (nirdhan), if we are able to create companies, learn how to get wealth, and bring wealth to society, then not to do so is equivalent to remaining wilfully poor (garib).’ The Samiti largely agreed with this perspective, and underlined the need for establishing companies.169 On the basis of the Samiti’s membership structure (which privileged the

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richer members of the community over the poor), as well as by examining the actual political interventions of Samiti members (for example in legislative politics), Swaraj Basu has argued that ‘the poor Rajbansis did not find in the caste movement any articulation of their economic demands. […] The emphasis on education, job, and political representation too had a very limited effect on the community as a whole.’170 He concludes that in the 1940s, under the twin pressures of Congress nationalism and Communist-backed peasant insurgency – especially the sharecroppers’ Tebhaga movement which demanded two-thirds (rather than the traditional half ) of the harvest – Rajavamshi caste politics came apart. Accordingly, in the 1946 elections to the Bengal Legislative Assembly, ‘the Congress and the Communists got more votes in Rajbansi areas than the Kshatriya Samiti’.171

I would juxtapose Basu’s narrative with the widespread observation that the Tebhaga movement heavily drew on Rajavamshi peasant solidarities, to the extent that it seemed at moments that ‘every Kshatriya had become a Communist’.172 Adrienne Cooper has concluded: ‘The districts where there were large Rajbansi communities were also areas where the tebhaga movement was particularly successful.’173 The participation and leadership of Rajavamshi women was especially notable.174 I would argue that not only pre-existing Rajavamshi peasant solidarities, but also the specific textures of political thinking and activist practices advocated by the Kshatriya Samiti since the 1910s, need to be factored in while appreciating the dynamics of Rajavamshi agrarian militancy. Basu is right in critiquing the class limitations of the Samiti’s politics. However, I would still underline that it is impossible to account for the density of peasant activism among Rajavamshis in the 1940s without taking into consideration the notions of peasant rulership, political autonomy, dignity and sacrality of peasant labour and freedom from exploitation which had been produced by Rajavamshi politics in the previous decades, and the ways in which the Samiti had politicised not just men, but also women. There is another sense too in which the 1940s was a pivotal decade for the renewal of Rajavamshi politics. Alongside earlier notions of (what I have called) peasant sovereignty, there now emerged among local (mostly, peasant-origin) communities a more territorially-defined aspiration for political autonomy. The immediate impetus was provided by the increasing migration – accelerated by the Partition of 1947 and the eruption of unprecedented sectarian violence – of Hindu Bengali immigrants from eastern Bengal into western Bengal, including

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into Cooch Behar. The threatened local administrative and landholding elites, drawing on the shared ancestry and still vibrant communitarian connections between lower caste Hindu peasant communities like the Rajavamshis and similarly-positioned Muslims, now tried to forge an ideology of Cooch Behari nationalism. They hoped that this could provide the nucleus for a Cooch Behar state which would retain some level of political sovereignty in postcolonial South Asia, instead of being merely subsumed into independent India. While, in the interwar years, Rajavamshi politics had been alienated from the Cooch Behar princely state, now the situation rapidly changed. The embattled prince Jagaddipendra Narayan and the princely order became metonyms for a local patriotic sovereignty which was challenged by a conquering Indian state (bent on ending the princely order of sovereignty) and by immigrant high-caste Hindu Bengalis. Intelligence reports of the Indian state feared that local Hindu and Muslim political actors in Cooch Behar, with the connivance of the Muslim League in neighbouring Pakistan, were planning to drive out the estimated 8 per cent of the population who were high-caste Hindus. Their supposed aim was to unite into a common platform the 49 per cent and 43 per cent of the population of Cooch Behar who were, respectively, lower caste Hindus and Muslims, in order to induce a merger of the princely state with Pakistan. The supposed leading architects of this strategy were Satish Chandra Singha, Minister of Education in Cooch Behar, and Khan Chowdhury Amanatullah Ahmed, Minister of Revenue and Finance, working through an association founded in 1946 named the Hitasadhani Sabha. Singha was close to the lower caste Bengali leader Jogendra Nath Mandal, Minister of Law and Labour in Pakistan, while Amanatullah was apparently proximate to the League. Alarmed by assertions of Cooch Behari patriotic sovereignty, as well as by the prospect of local political sympathy for Pakistan, the Government of India merged Cooch Behar with the Indian state in 1949, and thereafter swiftly, and coercively, suppressed the Hitasadhani movement.175 This was not quite the end of the trajectory through which Rajavamshi discourses on peasant rulership were supplemented by new territorialised notions of sovereignty. Rajavamshi politics re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a broader wave of ascendancy of regional politics across India. Some of these regional movements wanted greater autonomy within the Indian state, and others wanted to liberate themselves from India altogether. Rajavamshis provided a major base for the Uttar Khanda (literally, Northern Division)

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campaign, which sought a separate state within India, but outside West Bengal, carved out from the northern districts of the latter state. It was hoped that this would help local communities shake off the political, cultural and economic stranglehold of high-caste Bengalis, and (in spatial terms) the dominance of southern Bengal, on the region. The Uttar Khanda Dal was founded in 1969 at the celebrated Jalpesh temple of the god Shiva in Jalpaiguri district, a shrine associated for centuries with the Kamata and Koch kings; the temple remained for long a significant epicentre of its politics. It forged connections with the Gorkha movement of Himalayan Bengal, and also expressed sympathy for similar regional-nationalist movements in Assam, Tripura and Punjab. Rajavamshi politics initially alienated many of the immigrant lower caste Hindus, such as the Namashudras. Subsequently, many Rajavamshi political actors, to widen their appeal, articulated their campaign for political autonomy in more broad-based terms: they argued that lower caste and ‘tribal’ people were their allies, and they only sought to combat the dominance of the upper castes. They forged links with lower caste political platforms in other parts of India, including the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Dalit Shosit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti. In 1978, an umbrella organization of lower caste and tribal populations emerged in northern Bengal: the Uttar Banga Tapasili Jati o Adibashi Sangathan (North Bengal Scheduled Castes and Tribes Organization, UTJAS). The Uttar Khanda Dal and UTJAS had similar aims: to campaign for greater reservations in employment for the lower caste and ‘tribal’ populations of the region, to ensure that the latter’s land rights were protected and enhanced, and to demand from the state agricultural, commercial and industrial policies as well as trade and transport licenses which would benefit these communities. In the course of a secret meeting in 1985, followed by a public mass meeting in 1986, the Uttar Khanda movement also radically accentuated its demand for a separate Kamtapur state.176 The nomenclature of Kamtapur was significant. It re-invoked the memory of the Kamata kingdom, the first major polity in the region, and one which had, significantly, been founded by local martial peasant and pastoral communities. The remains of its capital in Gosanimari had become an important site of memory for the Kshatriya Samiti already in the interwar years.177 But it was only gradually, over the next decades, that the kingdom was refashioned to offer a template for territorial autonomy: from an archaeological and historical space, it became a space for dreaming of a future sovereignty. In parallel, the

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Koch kingdom and its colonial-era successor, the Cooch Behar princely state, also gained new traction within this context of spatialisation of Rajavamshi sovereignty. Gayatri Devi, Jagaddipendra Narayan’s sister and the last iconic figure from the princely dynasty, with a prominent stature in postcolonial Indian politics, is reported to have encouraged this association between Rajavamshi politics and the Koch dynasty’s royal glory when she presided over a celebration of Prince Chilarai’s birth anniversary in 1986.178 Since the 1990s, there has been a sharp growth in the political radicalism as well as social expanse of Rajavamshi politics, instigated in part by the declining legitimacy of Communist ideology and the final loss of state power by the Left Front government in 2011. In a milieu where Communist promises of universal liberation are seen by many political actors as having failed to offer adequate empowerment, and indeed to have served as a legitimating weapon for high-caste Bengalis, the rise of alternative lower caste community narratives has opened up new channels of utopian hope. The main players in Rajavamshi politics today are Kamtapur Liberation Organization, Kamtapur People’s Party, Greater Cooch Behar People’s Association, and Greater Cooch Behar Democratic Party. Of these, the Kamtapur Liberation Organization is the most militant; it has been accused of deploying violence in its pursuit of a separate Kamtapur state. The other political formations have resorted to a combination of constitutional politics and popular agitation. The range of political objectives has covered a wide spectrum: from demands for a Kamtapur state free of Indian control, to the (more widespread) hope for a state within India but outside West Bengal. These formations have supporters today among local Hindus as well as Muslims, and have sought to broaden their appeal to groups beyond those of Rajavamshi origin. The achievements of Panchanan Barma and the Kshatriya Samiti continue to serve as important sources of inspiration. However, in the search for a territorialised sovereignty, these political actors now place everincreasing importance on the history and memories of the Kamata and the Koch kingdoms. In this perspective, the demise of the Cooch Behar princely state in 1949 is cast as striking the death-knell for the independence of the local people. Exemplary of this approach is a pamphlet published in 2003 by the Greater Cooch Behar People’s Association, celebrating Cooch Behar’s princely coat of arms: it linked the dynastic ‘house’ (ghar) with a notion of ‘independent polity’ (svadhina rajya) embedded in ‘righteousness’ (dharma). According to the pamphlet, the Koch state was a ‘Ramarajya’ (ideal kingdom

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of the god-king Rama) and ‘svargarajya’ (kingdom of heaven), where rich and poor, Hindus and Muslims, lived in harmony, and were loved by the rulers like their own children. The disappearance of this state is supposed to have resulted in the utter abjection of the local population.179

For the Greater Cooch Behar movement in general, ‘monarchism’ constitutes an important point of reference. The activists base their claim to a Greater Cooch Behar state on the argument that with the end of British rule, the ruler of Cooch Behar should have got back control over all the rightful ancestral territories of the Koch kingdom, some of which had remained part of the colonial-era princely state, and others annexed into British India. Instead, the Governments of West Bengal and Assam are seen as having villainously usurped these territories. The role of the movement is to speak on behalf of this usurped (but not abrogated) sovereignty: it demands of the Indian state the right to constitute these historical Koch dynastic territories into a separate state within India, thereby rooting a notion of regional-national sovereignty in the Koch dynasty’s royal authority.180 In general, the various strands of contemporary Kamtapur and Greater Cooch Behar politics alike revere historical figures of the Koch dynasty; one of their main demands is for this history to be given sufficient recognition, for example, in history syllabi and in the nomenclature of public places. The annual celebration of the birth anniversary of the warrior Prince Chilarai constitutes a major political ritual; militias named after the prince have also begun to operate in the region. Gosanimari (the old Kamata capital) and the historical town of Cooch Behar continue to be significant sites of memory; the temples of Gosanimari and Kamakhya (the sacred shrine complex, now in Assam, but once part of the Koch kingdom) also constitute spaces for intense political mobilisation. Regular worship is offered to the god Shiva and the goddess Chandi as part of Rajavamshi politics. Chandi is often invoked especially as Kamta Ma or Kamteshvari (Mother Kamta or Lady of Kamata), and seen as a symbol of the regional nation and of the language, the latter regarded by many Rajavamshi activists as a language different from Bengali. Rajavamshi students are often encouraged to use the greeting ‘Jay Shiva Chandi’ (Victory to Shiva and Chandi), reportedly to the annoyance of high-caste Bengalis. There are attempts to involve members of the extended Koch dynastic lineage within the ambit of Rajavamshi politics. Following Gayatri Devi’s death in 2009, many Rajavamshi activists shaved their heads en masse: the ritual, usually done at the

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death of one’s parents, casts the Rajavamshi people-nation as the child, and thus heir, of deceased royalty.181 Whether a new kingship can now arise to embody this inheritance remains to be seen. The incidents alluded to at the beginning of this book perhaps represent attempts to initiate such a process.

Contemporary Rajavamshi politics (in its multiple strands) is viewed by some scholars as driven by an attempt by relatively wealthier sections of the community to recover and consolidate their social authority, and by others as a genuine political reaction to the social, economic and cultural marginalisation of the community by high-caste Bengalis. I believe that, in spite of its class and communitarian limitations, Rajavamshi activism has a significant radical potential. It has voiced the hopes and anxieties of lower caste groups of the region, in a political milieu (within West Bengal and, more generally, across India) where high-caste actors often seek to hegemonically orient public policy, devaluing the aspirations of subaltern social strata. A symbolic – politicotheological – embodiment of this resistance politics can be seen in the relation of Rajavamshi religiosity to the rising Hindu nationalist politics of contemporary India. Even as Rajavamshis resist incorporation into an Indian nationalist state, Kamteshvari remains inadequately assimilated into the empire of a monotheistic Hindu nationalist God, demonstrating, inter alia, the traction of polyarchic pantheons and subaltern divinities in modern India. As a sovereign goddess, Kamteshvari symbolises the aspiration for communitarian, and eventually territorial, sovereignty by a people whose identity had emerged through a longue durée of association between local divinities, local rulers and martial-peasant autonomy, and who aspire for a future where they will enjoy greater material entitlements, social honour and political authority and rights.

4.5 Conclusion While varna hierarchies were certainly not invented in the colonial period, they were accentuated and universalised as a result of colonial demilitarisation of peasants, revenue maximisation strategies, widespread economic exploitation (including loss of livelihood by artisanal groups) and British alliance with literate Indian gentry, in a broader context of orientalist interventions which gave primacy to Brahmanical values. But subalternised groups, including peasant communities, have also fought for power and honour against British and Indian elites. In claiming to be Kshatriyas and descendants of royal lineages,

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and collectivising notions of rulership and divinity, they evolved practices of shared sovereignty which helped in democratising the Indian political system. Decentralised, shared and distributed forms of precolonial authority, which were often marginalised through colonial interventions, and obscured by the imposition of monistic state power and Brahmanical authority, sometimes survived into the modern period, and could offer a basis for the building of modern-Western democratic structures of political association. Though these communities continue to suffer from economic and social deprivation resulting from ‘upper caste’ dominance, their self-assertion through community ‘upliftment’ techniques, electoral-party politics, and anti-state insurgency has enabled them to acquire significant political and social power. The extension of reservations in jobs, education and political representation and other welfare schemes by national and state governments has furthered these agendas. The communities which I have focused on through case-studies are typical of broader pan-Indian trends, though the extent of their political aggressiveness against the Indian state gives them a certain specificity. For Rajavamshis and Tripura’s ‘tribal’ communities, articulations of communitarian sovereignty have gradually become influenced also by new conceptions of territorial national sovereignty. Continued political, economic and cultural dominance of upper caste elites have intensified the desire among many individuals in these communities to forge separate territorial states that would give them greater freedom and better life-chances. Non-Brahmin movements have sometimes been marked by forms of masculinist-patriarchal hierarchy (partly due to influence of British imperial and varna notions of authority), even as they have also, not infrequently, privileged the interests of community elites over those of the poorer classes. This has limited the success of these movements. However, it would be misleading to argue that these groups simply reproduced upper caste and patriarchal hierarchies. Peasant norms of social horizontality and relatively egalitarian gender relations (as compared to those practised by Brahmanical groups) often persisted into the colonial and postcolonial periods, and provided welcoming ground for ideologies of class and gender equality. Socialist-democratic influence has sometimes helped reduce communitarian and gendered forms of social exclusion, while peasant solidarities have deepened the reach of left-democratic politics beyond elite strata. It could be argued that liberal-democratic visions affirmed by Western-educated upper caste Indians would have been inadequate

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in fostering substantive democratisation or multi-party rule in India, unless combated and supported by lower caste politics. In this context lower caste visions of sovereignty, articulated through claims of divine and royal identity, assume broader significance.

Endnotes 1

The term ‘tribal’ carries strong imprints of European colonial-racial ideas about the alleged ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilized’ nature of the communities so designated; in case of modern South Asia, it is further marked by high-caste Indian inferiorisation of these communities. However, ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is today a constitutional category in India that bestows specific rights on these groups; moreover, many of these actors have politically recuperated the term in order to protest against their oppression by ruling elites, as well as to demand rights as adivasis, ‘old/original inhabitants’, that is, as the indigenous people of the land. See Ellen Bal, They Ask if We Eat Frogs: Garo Ethnicity in Bangladesh, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007; Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (eds.), The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi, London: Routledge, 2011. I have used terms such as peasant, tribal and Kshatriya with regard for contextual specificities. In Tripura, the princely government often used the term parvatya praja (subjects from the hills/mountains) to refer to those who would gradually be called ‘tribal’/upajatiya, often by political actors from within these communities themselves. This book has used the term ‘peasant’ in a broad umbrella sense, as referring to different segments of agrarian society associated with cultivation and management of land, including those in Tripura who practised shifting cultivation. However ‘peasants’ did not constitute a homogenously definable and subordinated mass. As David Ludden notes: ‘In South Asia, there was no analogue to the Roman empire or Catholic Church under which a feudal nobility could establish itself and define the peasantry as a category of subordinate subject. Unlike China, agrarian states in South Asia evolved significantly within, among, and out of pastoral cultures and they integrated pastoral and forest people into forms of agrarian society that were not embraced by the classificatory system of a single imperial (and ethnic, Han) heritage. Modern images of the peasant that come from western and eastern Eurasia – which describe a rude rustic living under the jurisdiction of urban elites who embody high culture and civilisation – do not fit medieval South Asia.’ Ludden, Agrarian History, 74. 2 For a synoptic overview, see Bayly, Caste. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) was a Scheduled Caste leader who played a major role in the making of the Indian Constitution. 3 Inden, Imagining India; Dirks, Castes; Bayly, Caste. 4 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 5 M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998 (1966). 6 Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn (eds.), Structure and Change in Indian Society, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1996 (1968); Hitesranjan Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981.

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338 7

8

9

The Mortal God Surajit Sinha, ‘State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India’, Man in India 42(1) 1962: 35–80; Sinha (ed.), Tribal Polities; Chattopadhyaya, Early Medieval, 57-88; Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Romila Thapar, ‘Légitimation Politique et Filiation: Le Varna Kshatriya en Inde du Nord’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 39(4) 1984: 784. Thapar connects, in the context of precolonial India, the categories kshatra or sovereign power, Kshatriya, and rajanya. If kshatra is translated as sovereign power, how can one reconcile this with the Dumézilian argument about sovereignty inhering in priestly-juridical classes (and not in warriors like the Indian Kshatriyas) in Indo-European cultural worlds? Dumézil has in fact alluded to multiple senses of kshatra: see Georges Dumézil, ‘Khshathra’ in Jupiter, 136-56. Translating kshatra as sovereignty reveals other controversies in modern India. While middle and lower castes or ‘tribal’ peoples claimed kshatra to assert political power, Brahmanical ideologues like Radhakrishnan urged that dharma was the kshatra of kshatra (see Chapter 3): here, kshatra inhered neither in princes nor in people, but in rule of law itself. The meanings and loci of kshatra remain as contested in modern India as in early historical South Asia. Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-Européennes, vol. 2, Paris : Les Editions de Minuit, 1969, 17–22 ; quote from 18.

10 A. M. Shah and R. G. Shroff, ‘The Vahivanca Barots of Gujarat: A Caste of Genealogists and Mythographers’, The Journal of American Folklore 71(281) 1958: 246–76; Stephen Fuchs, The Gond and Bhumia of Eastern Mandla, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1960, 189–92, 198–99; William Rowe, ‘The New Cauhans: A Caste Mobility Movement in North India’, in Social Mobility in the Caste System in India, edited by James Silverberg, The Hague: Mouton, 1968, 66–77; Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1969; Ghanshyam Shah, Caste Association and Political Process in Gujarat: A Study of Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975; Hermann Kulke, ‘Kshatriyaization and Social Change: A Study in Orissa Setting’ in Aspects of Changing India, edited by S. Devadas Pillai, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1976, 398–409; Uma Ramaswamy, ‘The Belief System of the Non-Brahmin Movement in India: The Andhra Case’ Asian Survey 18(3) 1978: 290–300; Rosalind O’ Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Sipra Sen, Tribes and Castes of Manipur: Description and Select Bibliography, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1992, 66; Pinch, Peasants and Monks; Nandini Gooptu, ‘The Urban Poor and Militant Hinduism in Early Twentieth-Century Uttar Pradesh’ Modern Asian Studies 31(4) 1997: 879–918; Lawrence A. Babb, Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998, 137–73; Nonica Datta, Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; Biswamoy Pati, ‘Identity, Hegemony, Resistance: Conversions in Orissa, 1800–2000’, Economic and Political Weekly 36(44) 2001: 4204–12; Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, 78–80; Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Changing Identity of the Jats in North India: Kshatriyas, Kisans or Backwards?’, in Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner, edited by Sujata Patel, Jasodhara Bagchi and Krishna Raj,

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 339 Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002, 405–21; Arjun Guneratne, Many Tongues, One People: The Making of Tharu Identity in Nepal, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margin, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003; Anuja Agrawal, ‘“The Bedias are Rajputs”: Caste Consciousness of a Marginal Community’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 38(1–2) 2004: 221–46; Nandini Sinha Kapur, ‘The Minas: Seeking a Place in History’ in The Social and the Symbolic, edited by Bernard Bel et al., Delhi: Sage, 2007, 129–46; Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival, and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.

11 Kolff, Naukar; Dirk H. A. Kolff, ‘A Millennium of Stateless Indian History?’, in Rethinking a Millennium: Perspectives on Indian History from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century: Essays for Harbans Mukhia, edited by Rajat Datta, Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008, 51–67. 12 Gordon, Marathas, especially 14–17. 13 Dirks, Hollow Crown, 8. 14 Ibid., 10.

15 Bayly, Caste, 368.

16 When I use terms like ‘upper caste’ and ‘lower caste’ while referring to the nineteenth and twentieth century, I mean it in this historicised manner (as a deliberate vertical construction created through complicity between literate Indian gentry and British rulers) and not as a neutral description of facts. In their own eyes, many peasants were ‘upper castes’ who had been unjustly subordinated. 17 Rachel Sturman, ‘Marriage and Family in Colonial Hindu Law’ in Hinduism and Law: An Introduction, edited by Lubin et al., 95–96.

18 On ‘martial races’, see Constable, ‘Martial Race’; Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 19 Pinch, Peasants and Monks.

20 Walter Hauser, ‘From Peasant Soldiering to Peasant Activism: Reflections on the Transition of a Martial Tradition in the Flaming Fields of Bihar’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47(3) 2004: 401–34. 21 Eaton, Islam and Bengal.

22 Sanyal, Social Mobility; Sinha (ed.), Tribal Polities. 23 Sanyal, Social Mobility, 19, 37–38.

24 For the challenges faced by peasant elites in West Bengal, see, for example, Partha Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

25 Gurucharan Majumdar, Kayastha-Kaustubh, Calcutta, 1876; Girishchandra Basu, Jatitattva Prathambhag: Bange Brahman, Kayastha o Baidya, Chandpur, Tippera: Saraswati Press, 1903; Nikhilnath Ray, Pratapaditya, Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyay, 1906, and his Address at Murshidabad Kayastha Samiti, 1901; Yogeshchandra Simha, Upanayan Sambandhe Uttar-Rarhiya Kayasthamahodayganer Nikat Nivedan, Calcutta: Hare Press, 1914; Purnachandra Deb Sarkar, Deva-vamsha

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The Mortal God ba Kayastha-Kshatriya, Pabna, 1924; volumes of journals Kayastha Patrika, 1309–10 BS (1902–4) and 1317–34 BS (1910–28), Arya Kayastha Pratibha, 1317–29 BS (1910–22), and Kayastha Samaj, 1329–32 BS (1922–25).

26 Basanta Kumar Ray, Mahishya-Vivrti, Dacca: Abani Kumar Ray, 1915; Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872–1937, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1990, 116. 27 Ratna Ray and Rajat Ray, ‘Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 9(1) 1975: 101–2.

28 Shitikantha Smrtitirtha, Ugrakshatriya Samhita, Calcutta: Ugrakshatriya Samaj, 1893; Ugrakshatriya Pratinidhi, 1298 BS (1891–92) and 1299 BS (1892–93); Census of India, 1931, vol. V, Part 1 – Report, 455. 29 Nabinchandra Ghosh Yadav, Yaduvamsha: Gopajatir Kshatriyatver Praman Sambalita Yadavaganer Sankshipta Itihas, Kishoreganj: Nabinchandra Ghosh, 1923, Gopatattva, Kishoreganj: Krishnakali Press, 1924, and Gopa-Jatir Kshatriyatva, Kishoreganj: Yadav Samaj, Mymensingh, 1925.

30 Satadal Dasgupta, Caste, Kinship and Community: Social System of a Bengal Caste, Hyderabad: Universities Press, 1993, 30–33; H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. 1, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1998 (1891), 37; Rameshvar, Shiva-Sankirtana ba Shivayan, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 2012, 255–72.

31 Arild Engelsen Ruud, ‘From Untouchable to Communist: Wealth, Power and Status among Supporters of the Communist Party (Marxist) in Rural West Bengal’ in Sonar Bangla? Agricultural Growth and Agrarian Change in West Bengal and Bangladesh, edited by Ben Rogaly, Barbara Harriss-White and Sugata Bose, Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999, 253–78. 32 Manindranath Mandal, Arya-Paundrak, Calcutta: Khejuri Bratya Kshatriya Samiti, 1910; Purnachandra Ray, Arya-Paundra Kshatriya Samaj, Calcutta: Sathi Press, 1917; Mahendra Nath Karan, A Short History and Ethnology of the Cultivating Pods, Diamond Harbour: The All Bengal Bratya Kshattriya Samiti, 1919; Shashibhushan Mandal, Paundrakshatriya-Jatir Sankshipta Parichay o Kartavya-Nirnaya, Calcutta: Adharchandra Mandal, 1932; P. K. Bhowmick, Socio-Cultural Profile of Frontier Bengal, Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1976, 200–5; Paulami Chattopadhyay, ‘The Pod (Paundra Kshatriya) of West Bengal: From Social Mobility to Nativism’, in The Unrest Axle: Ethno-Social Movements in Eastern India, edited by Gautam Kumar Bera, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2008, 163–82. 33 K. S. Singh and P. P. Mahato, ‘The Mahato-Kurmi Mahasabha Movement in Chotanagpur’, in Tribal Movements in India, vol. 2, edited by K. S. Singh, Delhi: Manohar, 1983, 109–18; Pashupati Prasad Mahato, Sanskritization versus Nirbakization, Calcutta: Sujan Publications, 2000; Ranabir Samaddar, Memory, Identity, Power: Politics in the Jungle Mahals (West Bengal), 1890–1950, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998, 252–57.

34 Sinha, ‘State Formation’, 55–57.

35 Mahendranath Mallabarman, Dvitiyavarna (Kshatriya) ba Jhal-Mal Tattva, Achargram, Mymensingh: Dinanath Mallabarman, 1914; Mahimchandra Mallabarma, Jhalla-Malla Parichaya, Mymensingh: Bratya Kshatriya ba Jhal-Mal Samiti, 1931.

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 341

36 Karlsson, Contested Belonging, 202–3; also 33–35, 90–95, 160–61, 170–71, 195–228. Bengali sarkar refers to the Government of West Bengal. 37 Narayanchandra Saha, Shaundika-Purana, Nawabganj: Narayanchandra Saha, 1908, and Vaishya Khanda-Saha o Shaundik Yuga-Dharmatattva-Samaj-Granthakalavarnana evam Hindu-Jatibheda Vivrti, Nawabganj, 1910. 38 Radharaman Ray Barman, Pradhikarmakar ba Karmar-Kshatriya, Calcutta: Radharaman Ray Barman, 1919.

39 Census of India, 1911, vol. 5, part 1, 440–60; Census of India, 1921, vol. 5, part 1, 346– 50, 359; Census of India, 1931, vol. 5, part 1, 427–29, 455–56, 465–83; Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics, 115–21. 40 Bayly, Caste, 239–42; quote from 240. 41 Eaton, Islam and Bengal, 58.

42 H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. 2, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1998 (1891), 324. 43 Report on the Census of Bengal, 1901, Chapter I of Administrative Volume with Census Code, Appendix I, xlix.

44 Dasarath Deb, Mukti Parishader Itikatha, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1987, 38. Dasarath Deb (1916–98) was a Communist leader of Tripura of ‘tribal’ origin. 45 Risley, Tribes and Castes, vol. 2, 323–25.

46 Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Amar Jivan’ in Navinachandra Rachanavali, vol. 2, 43-45. Chatterjee, ‘Genealogy’, goes into fascinating detail, and offers incisive analyses, about these disputes, in relation to Sen as well as to Simha (see below); I draw on her research here. 47 Kailashchandra Simha, Rajamala ba Tripurar Itihas, Agartala: Akshar, 1998, especially 1, 8–9, 32–35, 39, 233, 238–40, 264–65. 48 Census of India, 1921, vol. 5, part 1, 362.

49 Kaliprasanna Sen (ed.), Shrirajamala, vols. 1–4, Agartala: Rajamala Karyalaya, 1926– 31, re-published by Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Government of Tripura, Agartala, 2003; Chatterjee, ‘Genealogy’. 50 Census of 1911, vol. V, Part 1, 452–60.

51 Tripur-Kshatriya Samaj Samkranta Vivarana-Samgraha, Agartala: Agartala State Press, 1343 Tripurabda (1933), re-published by the Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Government of Tripura, Agartala, 2006, 66, 73–74. 52 Rajgi Tripurar, 478–79.

53 Somendrachandra Debbarma (ed.), 1340 Tripurabda Saner Tripura Rajyer Census Vivarani, first published in 1343 Tripurabda from Agartala, Tripura State Press, and re-published by the Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Government of Tripura, Agartala, 1997, 77–96. 54 Ibid., 78.

55 Tripura Administration Report for 1320 T.E. (1910–11), in Reports of Tripura, vol. 1, 310; Tripura Administration Reports for 1335 T.E. (1925–26), 1337 T.E. (1927–28), 1338 T.E. (1928–29), 1341 T.E. (1931–32) in Administration Reports of Tripura State

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The Mortal God since 1902, vol. 3, Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1994, 1098–99, 1241, 1313–14, 1470–71; Tripura Administration Reports for 1342 T.E. (1932–33), 1343 T.E. (1933– 34), 1344 T.E. (1934–35), 1345 T.E. (1935–36), in Reports of Tripura, vol. 4, 1576–77, 1656, 1738–39, 1826–27.

56 Aya Ikegame, ‘Space of Kinship, Space of Empire: Marriage Strategies amongst the Mysore Royal Caste in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46(3) 2009: 343–72. 57 Tripur-Kshatriya Vivarana-Samgraha, 67–70.

58 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in his Colonialism, 114. On khilat in India, Bengal, and Tripura, see: Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; McLane, Local Kingship, 107–15; Rajgi Tripurar, 101-2. 59 Gail Minault, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Robing and Sovereignty in Late Mughal and Early British India’, in Gordon (ed.), Robes, 127. 60 Rajgi Tripurar, 59.

61 Tripura Gazette, 173–74. 62 Ibid., 314.

63 Tripur-Kshatriya Vivarana-Samgraha, 70. 64 Ibid., 71–72.

65 Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, 349. 66 Tripur-Kshatriya Vivarana-Samgraha, 73–77; Rajgi Tripurar, 104–7, 111.

67 Tripur-Kshatriya Vivarana-Samgraha, 1–6, 66–67; Tripura Gazette, 159–61; Svadhin Tripura Gramyamandali Ain, published by Agartala State Press in 1350 Tripurabda (1940), and re-published by the Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Government of Tripura, Agartala, in 2006; Banikantha Bhattacharyya, Tripura Administration: The Era of Modernisation (1870–1972), Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1986, 160–208. 68 Tripura Gazette, 300.

69 Svadhina Tripurar Rajsabhar Vidhi, Agartala: Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Government of Tripura, 2004, 1-4. 70 Tripura Gazette, 299–300.

71 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 153/39, File No. 113/39. 72 Harihar Bhattacharyya, ‘The Reang Rebellion in Tripura, 1943–45, and the Birth of an Ethnic Identity’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 32(3) 1995: 388. 73 Sen (ed.) Shrirajamala, vol. 2, 147–48. 74 Deb, Mukti Parishader, 14–17.

75 J. B. Ganguli, The Benign Hills: A Study in Tripura’s Population Growth and Problems, Agartala: Tripura Darpan Prakashani, 1983, 48, 60.

76 Tarit Mohan Das Gupta, Tripuray Svadhinata Samgramer Smrti, Agartala: Pilak, 1992, 74.

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 343

77 Tripur Chandra Sen, Tripura in Transition (1923–1957 AD), Agartala: Tripur Chandra Sen, 1970, 62–63.

78 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal Sl. No. 210-26, File No. 35/26, ‘Communist Party of India – Tripura’; Deb, Mukti Parishader, 21–25, 38–39, 63–65, 82, 130; Dasarath Deb, ‘Ganamukti Parishader Janma Katha’ (1974), in Dasarath Deb Nirvachita Rachana Samkalan, vol. 1, Agartala: Communist Party of India (Marxist), Tripura Rajya Committee, 2002, 76–81; Dilip Dam (ed.), Maitrir Setu Dasarath Deb, Agartala: Jnana Bichitra, 2006, especially 13, 22–27, 56, 73–74, 140, 157–58; Sen, Transition; Unpublished interview of Tripura’s Communist leader Saroj Chanda by journalist Subir Bhaumik, 11 June 1987; Das Gupta, Tripuray Smrti, 73–74, 83, 97–124, 148–51; Nilmani Debbarman, Gadyasamgraha: Janashiksha Andolan o Anyanya Pravandha, Agartala: Bhasha, 2010, 41; Saroj Chanda, Prekshapat Tripura, Agartala: Tripura Darpan, 2006, 25–26; Subhabrata Deb and Kumud Kundu Chowdhury (eds.), Patabhumika Andolan evam Janashiksha Samiti: Samgathak evam Samasamayikder Mulyayan, Agartala: Akshar Publications, 2008; Harihar Bhattacharyya, Communism in Tripura, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1999; Biman Dhar, Anya Manush, Anya Rajniti, Agartala: Tripura Darpan, 2010, 133–34. Harihar Bhattacharyya has provided the most detailed scholarly analysis of this early history of Communism in Tripura; I draw here extensively on his research too. 79 Risley, Tribes and Castes, vol. 2, 323–24. 80 Deb, Mukti Parishader, 68–70.

81 Ibid., 95–98; Sen, Transition, 81.

82 Dasarath Deb, ‘Kokborok Likhitarupe Uttaraner Pathe Aitihasik Antaray o Bangasanskrtir Bhumika’, in Dasarath Samkalan, 94–95. 83 Deb, Mukti Parishader, 99–100. 84 Ibid., 70.

85 Das Gupta, Tripuray Smrti, 118.

86 Pratap Choudhury, ‘Regional Political Parties in Tripura: A Genesis’, Jagat Jyoti Ray, ‘Tripura Upajati Juba Samity – A Regional Political Party’, and Mahadev Chakravarti, ‘The TUJS: From Petition to Power’, in Regional Political Parties in North East India, edited by L. S. Gassah, Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1992, 211–40; Mahadev Chakravarti, ‘Insurgency in Tripura: Some Trends’, Economic and Political Weekly 36(25) 2001: 2229–31; Chanda, Prekshapat, 78–94. 87 R. K. Debbarma, Heroes and Histories: The Making of Rival Geographies of Tripura, Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2013, 31. 88 Risley, Tribes and Castes, vol. 1, 491. 89 Ibid., 499.

90 E. A. Gait, A History of Assam, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1906, 40–43; K. L. Barua, Early History of Kamarupa: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century, Shillong: K. L. Barua, 1933, 242–69; R. C. Majumdar, ‘The Kingdom of Kamata’, in The Delhi Sultanate, edited by R. C. Majumdar, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1990, 388-90. 91 Harishchandra Paul (ed.), Radhakrishna Das, Gosanimangal, Cooch Behar: Chandrashekhar Paul, 1977.

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92 Ibid., 2-3.

93 D. Nath, History of the Koch Kingdom, 1515–1615, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989. 94 Amanatullah, Koch Biharer Itihasa, 78–87; Radhakrishna Das, Gosanimangal, 110.

95 Rameshvar, Shivayan, 95–97, 243. Significantly, the only complete version of this text was found in the Cooch Behar princely library (xvii). 96 Risley, Tribes and Castes, vol. I, 492. 97 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 140.

98 Jae-Eun Shin, ‘Yoni, Yoginis and Mahavidyas: Feminine Divinities from Early Medieval Kamarupa to Medieval Koch Behar’, Studies in History 26(1) 2010: 1–29; Hugh B. Urban, ‘The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in Assam’, The Journal of Hindu Studies 4(3) 2011: 231–47.

99 Montgomery Martin, The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India, vol. 3, London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1838, 415; E. T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, Calcutta: Government of Bengal, 1872, 89–92; Upendranath Barman, Rajavamshi Kshatriya Jatir Itihasa, vol. 1, Jalpaiguri: Bijaykumar Barman, 1941, 42, 46, 52; Swaraj Basu, Dynamics of a Caste Movement: The Rajbansis of North Bengal, 1910-1947, Delhi: Manohar, 2003, 26–30, 66–67; Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay, ‘Social Formation of the Rajbansis and the Emergence of the Kamtapuri Identity’ in Identity, Cultural Pluralism and State: South Asia in Perspective, edited by N. K. Das and V. R. Rao, Delhi: Macmillan, 2009, 481–83, 489–90. 100 Basu, Caste Movement, 51.

101 Ibid. See also Jagat Mohan Devsimha Barman, Kshatriya Rajavamshi Kula Kaumudi, arthat Paundra Kshatriya Rajavamshi Jatir Itivrtta, Hatibandha, Rangpur, 1911; Kshetranath Simha, Ray Saheb Panchanan Barmar Jivani ba Rangpur Kshatriya Samitir Itihasa, Calcutta: Anima Prakashani, 2008 (1939); Upendranath Barman, Rajavamshi Itihasa; Charu Chandra Sanyal, The Rajbansis of North Bengal, Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1965; Upendranath Barman, Thakur Panchanan Barmar Jivanacharita, Calcutta: Panchanan Smarak Samiti, 1980; Madhuparni, Vishesh Koch Bihar Jela Samkhya, 1989, especially Shibshankar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Koch Biharer Samajik Kathamo’, 104–25; Ranajit Das Gupta, Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri, 1869–1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; K. S. Singh, The Scheduled Castes, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1105–7; Subhajyoti Ray, Transformations on the Bengal Frontier: Jalpaiguri, 1765–1948, London: Routledge Curzon, 2002; Ananda Gopal Ghosh and Nilangshu Shekhar Das (eds.), Uttar Banger Itihasa o Samaj, Siliguri: Dipali Publishers, 2009. 102 Letter from F. J. Monahan, ICS, Commissioner of the Rajshahi Division, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Political Department, Jalpaiguri, 30 October 1912, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, B-Proceedings for March 1913, Nos. 306–322, File No. 9A-5(7–23).

103 Letter from Rai Saheb Panchanan Barma, Secretary, Kshattriya Samity, Rangpur, to S. K. Haldar, ICS, District Magistrate of Rangpur, 15 June 1924, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Progs., B 169–171, July 1924, File 8A-9.

104 No. 991G, Siliguri, 24 April 1933, from F. O. Bell, ICS, Sub-divisional Officer,

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 345 Siliguri, to the Deputy Commissioner, Darjeeling, in Appointment Department, Reforms Branch, Government of Bengal, April 1934, Progs. Nos. 9-61, File No. 1-R2 of 1933, Serial Nos. 1-53.

105 Letter from S. K. Haldar, ICS, District Magistrate of Rangpur, to the Commissioner of the Rajshahi Division, Jalpaiguri, 19 June 1924, Letter from W. A. Marr, ICS, Offg. Commissioner of the Rajshahi Division to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Political Department, 23 June 1924, and Letter from Rai Saheb Panchanan Barma, Secretary, Kshattriya Samity, Rangpur, to S. K. Haldar, ICS, District Magistrate of Rangpur, 15 June 1924, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Progs., B 169-171, July 1924, File 8A-9. 106 Census of India 1911, vol. V, Part 1, 445.

107 Census of India 1921, vol. V, Part 1, Report, 349.

108 Census of India 1931, vol. V, Part 1, Report, 473–74. 109 Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 23–25.

110 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Indian Franchise Committee, vol. I, Report of the Indian Franchise Committee, 1932, 218; Basu, Caste Movement, 91; Appointment Department, Reforms Branch, Government of Bengal, April 1934, Progs. Nos. 9–61, File No. 1-R-2 of 1933, Serial Nos. 1–53.

111 Stephen P. Cohen, ‘The Untouchable Soldier: Caste, Politics, and the Indian Army’, The Journal of Asian Studies 28(3) 1969: 453–68; Omar Khalidi, ‘Ethnic Group Recruitment in the Indian Army: The Contrasting Cases of Sikhs, Muslims, Gurkhas and Others’, Pacific Affairs 74(4) 2001–02: 529–52; Gavin Rand, “‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914’, European Review of History 13(1) 2006: 1–20. 112 His Excellency’s Speech at the Send-Off to the Bengali Regiment on 6 September 1916, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 504 (1–23) of 1916, ‘Recruitment of Bengali Double Company’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 282/1917, ‘Attitude of Hon’ble Maulvi Fazl-ul Haq in regard to the enlistment of Muhammadans in the Bengali Double Company’; Letter from J. H. Kerr to A. H. Bingley, Secretary to the Government of India, Army Department, 27 February 1917, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 165(1-6), 1917, ‘Recruiting in Bengal’; Letter from J. H. Kerr, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary, Central Recruiting Board, Simla, No. 1931 P. – D., 9 July 1917, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 165(7–17)/1917, ‘Recruiting in Bengal’; Letter No. 37R, from Colonel E. W. Boudier, Recruiting Officer, Bengal, to the Adjutant-General in India, 12 May 1917, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 165(7–17), 1917, ‘Recruiting in Bengal’; Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 43(1-2), File No. 43(3–11), and File No. 43(12–21) of 1920, ‘Proposed Disbandment of the 49th Bengalis’. 113 Kshatriya Samiti, Navam Varsher arthat San 1325 Saler Vrttavivarani, 1919, 60–61. 114 Ibid., 60.

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115 Ibid., 21–24, 37–40, 58-65; Kshatriya Samiti, Trtiya Varsher Vrttavivarani, Chaturtha Varsher Adhiveshan, 1913, 2; Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivaran, 1918, 4, 23, 56–61; Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 1–6, 11–12, 32–46, 52–53; Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 5–6, 8–9, 20–23; Kshatriya Samiti, San 1327 Saler Vrtta Vivaran, 1921, 1; Manbhol Barman, Kshatriya-Tattva, Chepani, 1928, 67-69; Shashibhushan Barma Faujdar, Basi-Phul, Raghunandapur: Jagabandhu Ray Sarkar, 1918, 5–6, 9–13, 36–45, 54. 116 Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 3–4.

117 Kshatriya Samiti, Trtiya Varsher Vrttavivarani, Chaturtha Varsher Adhiveshan, 1913, 2–3, 23–26. 118 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 2–7. 119 Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 20–24, 100-1.

120 Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivaran, 1918, 50–52. 121 Ibid., 55.

122 Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 2.

123 Upendranath Barman, Uttar-Banglar Sekal o Amar Jivana-Smrti, Jalpaiguri: Bijaykumar Barman, 1985, 30–36; Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 25; Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 30. 124 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 13. 125 Ibid., 18–19.

126 Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 573, 613, 622–23; Haricharan Bandyopadhyay, Bangiya Shavdakosha, vol. 2, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2001 (1966), 1320–21.

127 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 128 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 11.

129 http://india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/constitution/preamble.pdf, accessed 8 February 2014. 130 Upendranath Barman, Rajavamshi Itihasa, 50. .

131 Jagat Mohan Devsimha Barman, Kshatriya Kaumudi, 34–36. 132 Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 95.

133 Nabinchandra Ghosh Yadav, Yaduvamsha, 8.

134 E.g. Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 12–13, 24. 135 Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 27. 136 Ibid., 25.

137 Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar Jivanacharita, 13–14.

138 Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 50–51. The original, in Bengali, refers to Haidrosian, which I think refers to Hadrian, since, in the context of the foundation of the colony of Aelia Capitolina ( Jerusalem), Hadrian was depicted in coins ‘as founder, ploughing with bull and cow the sulcus primigenius (aboriginal furrow) that established the colony’s pomerium (sacred boundary)’. See

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 347 Mary T. Boatwright, Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, 199.

139 Lecomte-Tilouine, Hindu Kingship, 67–68; Koompong Noobanjong, ‘Rajadamnoen Avenue: Thailand’s Transformative Path towards Modern Polity’, in Transforming Asian Cities: Intellectual Impasse, Asianizing Space, and Emerging Translocalities, edited by Nihal Perera and Wing-Shing Tang, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, 42. 140 I. D. Mills, ‘The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic – The Indian Experience’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 23(1) 1986: 1–40. 141 Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 51.

142 Upendranath Barman, Uttar-Banglar Sekal, 68–72. Upendranath Barman was a Rajavamshi politician; he served as member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly (1937-45, Minister 1941-43) and was elected to the Indian Parliament in the 1952 and 1957 elections. 143 On the peasant cult of Balarama, see Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 139.

144 Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics, 142–99; Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 61–78; Panchanan Barma, President-elect, All-Bengal Depressed Classes Conference (Special Session), 28 August 1932, in Appointment Department, Reforms Branch, Government of Bengal, B-August 1933, Progs. 870–886, File No. 1R-90. 145 Appointment Department, Reforms Branch, Government of Bengal, B-August 1933, Progs. 870-886, File No. 1R-90; Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 6178; Basu, Caste Movement, 94–98. 146 Kshatriya Samiti, Trtiya Varsher Vrttavivarani, Chaturtha Varsher Adhiveshan, 1913, 1. 147 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 19. 148 Ibid., 14.

149 Ibid., 23–24. 150 Ibid., 58–59.

151 Ibid., 4, 14–17, 27–30, 35–38; Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 28–30.

152 Kshatriya Samiti, Trtiya Varsher Vrttavivarani, Chaturtha Varsher Adhiveshan, 1913, 8, 10; Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 28–33, 59–63; Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 78–82; Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 30, 47–58.

153 Lucy Carroll, ‘Law, Custom, and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 20(4) 1983: 363–88. 154 Chaudhuri, Cooch Behar, 131–32, noted the relatively free position of women in local society in Cooch Behar (‘almost full liberty both within and without the house’) and their importance in household, agricultural, artisanal and market work. Risley (Tribes and Castes, vol. 1, 494–95) discussed Rajavamshi adoption of Brahmanical customs like child marriage and prohibition of widow remarriage and of premarital sex among women, though these tendencies had ‘only recently been adopted’ and were not followed by all. See also Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay (ed.), Some Early Accounts of the Rajbansi and Allied Communities, Siliguri: N. L. Publishers, 2014.

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155 Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 30, 47-58; Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 78–82.

156 Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivarani, 1918, 46–49; Kshatriya Samiti, Navam Varsher arthat San 1325 Saler Vrttavivarani, 1919, 57; Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 22.

157 Singh (ed.), Scheduled Castes, 1106.

158 Kshatriya Samiti,Trtiya Varsher Vrttavivarani, Chaturtha Varsher Adhiveshan, 1913, 8–14; Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivarana, 1918, 7, 30–35; Kshatriya Samiti, Navam Varsher arthat San 1325 Saler Vrttavivarani, 1919, 17–19, 44–49; Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 30-31; Kshatriya Samiti, Chaturdash Varsher arthat San 1329 Saler Vrttavivaran, 1923, 23–30; Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 50–51, 56–57. 159 Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay, The Rajbansis of North Bengal: A Comparative Demographic Profile, Dist. Darjeeling: University of North Bengal, 1990, 28.

160 In Sanskrit, and thus in Bengali, praja literally implies ‘offspring’ (related to prajan: ‘to be born or produced’, ‘be begotten’). Normally praja refers to those under a ruler (in colonial Bengal, also under a zamindar): Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 658; Bandyopadhyay, Bangiya Shavdakosha, vol. 2, 1372–73. 161 Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivarana, 27–30. 162 Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 87–88.

163 Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 26-29; also Basu, Caste Movement, 72–73. 164 Kshatriya Samiti, Navam Varsher arthat San 1325 Saler Vrttavivarani, 1919, 52. 165 Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 30–33.

166 Kshatriya Samiti, Chaturdash Varsher arthat San 1329 Saler Vrttavivaran, 1923, 2.

167 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 58.

168 Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 12–16, 24, 30–33; Kshatriya Samiti, Dasham Varshik Adhiveshan, Karyavivaran, 1919, 16–17, 25–27; Kshatriya Samiti, San 1327 Saler Vrttavivaran, 1921, 4-5; Kshatriya Samiti, Chaturdash Varsher arthat San 1329 saler Vrttavivaran, 1923, 30–31; Upendranath Barman, Panchanan Barmar, 60–61; Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 69–70.

169 Kshatriya Samiti, Ekadash Sammilani, Karyavivarani, 1919, 15–16.

170 Basu, Caste Movement, 116-17. On the Samiti’s membership structure and its class bias, see Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Progs. B169-171, July 1924, File 8A-9; Kshatriya Samiti, San 1324 Saler Ashtam Varsher Vrttavivarana, 1918, 2–4.

171 Basu, Caste Movement, 129.

172 Manikrishna Sen, ‘Rangpurer Tebhaga Samgramer Katha’, in Tebhaga Andolan, edited by Dhananjay Ray, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2000, 101.

173 Adrienne Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1988, 257. 174 Basu, Caste Movement, 128.

175 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No.

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‘One has to Rule Oneself ’ 349 7/47, File No. 1238/47, ‘Pakistan Activities on the Border of West Bengal: Cooch Behar’; Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 423/47, File No. 414/47, ‘Agitation in the Native States’ (especially important in this file is a Report of D.I.G., 28.10.47); Ananda Gopal Ghosh, ‘The Problem of the Integration of Cooch Behar State with Indian Union’, in Dimensions of National Integration: The Experiences and Lessons of Indian History, edited by Nisith Ranjan Ray, Calcutta: Punthi-Pustak, 1993, 407–19; Dinesh Chandra Dakua, ‘A Journey from Hitasadhani to Greater Kuch Bihar’, Prasenjit Barman, ‘Hitasadhani Movement’, and Ananda Gopal Ghosh, “The Hitasadhani Sabha – Power Struggle by the ‘Cooch Beharis’”, in Socio-Political Movements in North Bengal, vol. 1, edited by Sukhbilas Barma, Delhi: Global Vision Publishing House, 2007, 49–110; Parbananda Das, ‘The Hitasadhanee Sabha and the Tensions of Cooch Behar’s Integration with India’, in Social and Political Tensions in North Bengal (since 1947), edited by Sailen Debnath, Siliguri: N. L. Publishers, 2007, 99–127; Dinesh Dakua, Hitasadhani theke Kamtapuri, Calcutta: Dip Prakashani, 2005.

176 Office of Intelligence Branch, Police, West Bengal, File No. 6032–85, Section: Communal, Subject: Uttarkhand Dal, 1985: especially see the record ‘A Note on the Uttar Khanda Dal – Jalpaiguri District’. The idea of Kamtapur as a separate state may have originated earlier: a date of 1955 is suggested by Lalitchandra Barman, ‘Kamtapuri Andolan: Manastattva, Utsa, Abhimukh’, in Uttarer Ganachetanar Gatiprakrti, edited by Debabrata Chaki, Koch Bihar: Uttar Prasanga Publications, 2010, 153–54. See also Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay, Uttarkhand Movement: A Sociological Analysis, Darjeeling Dist.: University of North Bengal, 1987; Haripada Ray, ‘The Genesis of Uttar Khanda Movement’, and Naren Das, ‘Uttar Banga Tapasili Jati o Adibashi Sangathan (UTJAS): A Dalit Student Movement’, in SocioPolitical Movements, vol. 1, edited by Barma, 111–64; Srabani Ghosh, ‘Revisiting the Uttarkhand Movement’, in Social and Political Tensions, edited by Debnath, 179–84. 177 Kshatriya Samiti, Navam Varsher arthat San 1325 Saler Vrttavivarani, 1919, 19–20; Simha, Panchanan Barmar, 45–48.

178 Office of Intelligence Branch, Police, West Bengal, File No. 6032–85, Section: Communal, Subject: Uttarkhand Dal, 1985. 179 See the pamphlet, ‘Dangar Koch Biharbasir Kayta Katha’, written by Bangshi Badan Barman, and published by GCPA from Dinhata on 13 December 2003, kept in Office of IB, Government of West Bengal, Section: Communal, File on GCPA. Also comparable is the GCPA pamphlet ‘Sachetanatar Ahvan’, written by Nalini Kanta Barman, in Office of IB, Government of West Bengal, Section: Communal, File on GCPA/GCDP.

180 Office of ADG/Intelligence Branch, Government of West Bengal, Section: Communal, File on GCPA/GCDP; Office of IB, Government of West Bengal, Section: Communal, File on GCPA. 181 I base this analysis on Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, West Bengal Police, Section: Communal, Records on Greater Cooch Behar People’s Association and Greater Cooch Behar Democratic Party (GCPA/GCDP), Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO), and All India Kamtapur Students Union (AKSU).

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5 ‘God’s Kingdom has Come’ Messianic Sovereignty in Late Colonial India 5.1 Introduction In this chapter, I argue that messianic politics helped forge ideological links between elite nationalism and popular (especially peasant) politics in latecolonial India (ca. 1919–47). These emerged through the intersections between popular visions of messianic and millenarian liberation, Hindu-Indian and Indo-Islamic nationalist (and transnational) political theologies and various forms of socialist-Communist discourses. I use the term ‘messianic’ in a flexible and encompassing way, to refer to Indic ideals of avatara and miraculous ascetic rulership, Islamic notions of Mahdi, mujaddid and Allah’s kingdom to come, and Christological ideas. While some of the idioms discussed here were not messianic in a narrow sense, they were proximate to utopian and millenarian themes and therefore merit critical scrutiny. I also foreground the class and community differences which created schisms within these imaginaries and limited their appeal. While peasant visions were often grounded in attempts to remove colonial revenue, rents and taxes, and to create a space for militant peasant power in a utopian polity, elite ideologies sought to harness the peasants into projects of nation-making without necessarily overturning the social order. Messianic movements articulated anti-colonial imaginaries of ‘modernity’, crafted not exclusively through teleological exercises imposed from above, but also through combative resistance against state apparatuses. The ‘modernity’ of these visions lay in their efforts to create utopian political systems characterised by diverse conceptions of freedom, justice and rights, even as these programmes were inspired by more ancient grammars of divinely-ordained rulership and political community. The messianic polity and sovereign were ‘hybrid’ icons: representations of progress sculpted through conversations and compromises between varied communities and classes of Indians and the colonial state. These visions were rooted in transregional contexts. The global First World War fuelled political anxieties among Indians and helped forge new messianic hopes for a better post-war world. Contestations about the Ottoman Caliphate

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snowballed into expectations about the advent of a kingdom of God, while the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet state offered new sources of utopian hope. Gandhi, among other Indians, cast the struggle against the British Empire as a replay of Judaeo-Christian resistance to the ancient Roman Empire, even as he himself acquired a messianic image among many Indians. Further, with respect to transregional history, one may link South Asian and European politics in terms of the global effects of the Great Depression in increasing the traction of charismatic sovereign figures. But the subcontinent had its specificities: in terms of the continuing presence of the colonial state structure, in relation to the absence of any consensual model of militant nationalist dictatorship, as well as in terms of the frequent chanellising of sectarian-nationalist tensions into catastrophic Hindu-Muslim conflicts. Across the 1930s and 1940s, alliances forged between sectarian leaders and peasant actors aggravated the climate of violence, even as they produced new, often theologically-inflected, models of future political community.

There have been some excellent studies on various specific aspects of messianic politics in late-colonial India; these have been duly cited in this chapter. Drawing on these as well as on some fascinating cases which have escaped adequate scholarly attention till now, I offer a conceptual argument that weaves in messianic themes with the ideals of rulership sketched in earlier chapters. Painting that broader picture is a unique feature of this book. Thereby, I draw attention to the quest for justice and rights which can be found in diverse human societies and which have been harnessed in recent times to create different ‘modern’ political forms, even as they have also been compromised by assertions of hierarchical power and violence.

5.2 A ‘utopian moment’? Anti-colonial messianism in the late 1910s and early 1920s1 The period during and immediately following the First World War was a difficult era for many Indians. A combination of material troubles (increased fiscal pressure, inflation and manpower deficit induced by the war, including military recruitment), in tandem with rising political anger against the British for the repressive Rowlatt Act, the brutal Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 and British campaigns against the Ottoman Sultan (regarded as the khalifa/ Caliph by large sections of Sunni Muslims), contributed to fuelling explosive waves of anti-colonial militancy. These climaxed in the Non-Cooperation,

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Khilafat and early Indian Communist movements. Some of the Indian rebels were inspired by earlier exemplars of anti-colonial activism, including those dating to the Swadeshi era. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 sealed unity between Congress and Muslim League politicians, while the Home Rule agitation also provided a platform for voicing political aspirations. Many Indians were stirred by the Russian Revolution and by Anglo-American rhetoric about liberty and representative government, even as they felt that Indians deserved to be rewarded for their participation in the Great War through devolution of powers. The Government of India Act of 1919, by expanding the electorate and increasing the scope for Indians to take part in formal politics, intensified political ambitions, even as peasant and ‘tribal’ actors took to militancy to protest against harsh revenue, rent and forest tax and legal burdens.2

It is widely known that many Indian political actors in this epoch, cutting across social strata, expressed their hopes and anxieties through messianic and apocalyptic vocabularies, casting the Indian struggle against the British as a replay of a cosmic war between good and evil. Among them were Mahatma Gandhi and the Ali Brothers: ‘they attracted large, and often vast crowds, who came mainly to have a glimpse of the Mahatma about whom unscrupulous agitators were circulating to the credulous masses stories of divine attributes and miraculous powers.’3 Through 1920 and 1921, Gandhi redefined British rule as Ravanarajya (rule of the demon king Ravana), as rakshasi (demonic) rule and as ‘Satanic’, since it destroyed indigenous manufactures and commerce, oppressed people through its revenue and tax demands, played Hindus and Muslims against each other, put to death Indian nationalists and was racist to the core. Against it Gandhi posed swaraj or independence, also referred to as Ramarajya (rule of the avatara king Rama, standing for a perfect society) and dharmarajya (righteous polity/kingdom): a political order where Indians would live with freedom, and be able to pursue both spiritual and material welfare.4 Exemplary of this political tone is his speech in Madras in 1921: ‘For do we not claim and do we not say from a thousand platforms that the present Government is a Kingdom of Satan and do we not claim that we seek to substitute the Kingdom of Satan by the Kingdom of God.’5 Gandhi emphasised tapascharya/tapasya (ascetic practice) as a method as well as a definition of swaraj. This Gandhian ascesis encompassed both traditional ideas of self-cultivation through meditation as well as political-democratic ideas of service to the people, and especially to the poor, the lower castes and other

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disempowered segments of society.6 Ascesis was itself swaraj: this Vedic word of kingship was reframed – as Ananya Vajpeyi, among others, has noted – to imply a self-rule that embedded mastery of the polity – political sovereignty – in mastery of the ethicalised self – in spiritual sovereignty.7 Gandhi wrote in 1921: ‘Swaraj means rule over one’s self ’, and ‘it is possible that sadhus [ascetics] as individuals enjoy swaraj even at present, and that, even when we have a parliament of our own, people may not feel that they are free. Swaraj, therefore, means easy availability of food and cloth, so much so that no one would go hungry or naked for want of them.’8 Gandhi also transferred the ritual vocabulary of yajna (sacrifice, especially a Vedic one) into the political vocabulary of a sovereignty that rested on ‘self-sacrifice’. Non-cooperation ‘was some kind of yajna or tapas’ for ‘public welfare’. The suffering of Jesus ‘to win salvation for his people’ also offered a model for this sacrificial sovereignty.9 Further, Gandhi figured (in a 1919 leaflet) the anti-colonial struggle as a successor to the cosmic wars imagined in Zoroastrianism, between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, between God and Satan, and in the ancient Indian text Gita.10 Heroes and heroines of Indian legend, peasant rebels, Jesus and Prophet Muhammad were alike portrayed as Non-Cooperators.11 Gandhi underlined the trans-historical relevance of the Indian rebellion by comparing it to Jesus’ supposed insurrection against Rome, noting in 1920: ‘Christ died on the Cross with a crown of thorns on his head defying the might of a whole Empire. And if I raise resistances of a non-violent character I simply and humbly follow in the footsteps of the great teachers.’12 Gandhi affirmed that through this struggle, India would see ‘the Kingdom of God established on earth instead of that of Satan which has enveloped Europe’.13 In this vision, ‘Jesus Christ was nothing if not a heroic satyagrahi’; ‘he himself opposed, all alone, the mighty Roman Empire’.14 Broad sections of rural and urban society in India responded to this political theology by acclaiming Gandhi as a messianic being. The British felt that if ‘it is remembered that for the purposes of Non-co-operation propaganda Swaraj was synonymous with Utopia it is not surprising that the cry of “Gandhi ke Raj ki jai” [Victory to the kingdom/rule of Gandhi] became common among the ignorant people who were his dupes.’15 Gandhi however dissuaded people from shouting ‘Gandhi Maharaj-ki-jai’ (Victory to Great King Gandhi).16 He stated that he wanted swaraj and not ‘Gandhi-raj’ (Kingdom/rule of Gandhi); nor did he want people to be obsequious to him or regard him as a deity.17 The Ramarajya he spoke about did not signify the rule of monarchs like Rama,

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but ‘swaraj or the rule of dharma or people’s rule. Such rule can be established only when the people themselves come to have regard for dharma and learn to be brave. […] If the people are to be emancipated only by some king, they will become his slaves, though in himself he may be a man of virtue.’18 As in the use of sarvabhauma in Indian nationalist intellection, here too, Ramarajya encoded the use of a category of kingship to articulate a broader doctrine of national (non-monarchic) sovereignty.

Gandhi’s idiom of messianic rulership was thus hospitable to popular sovereignty, to be instantiated by a people ordained in righteousness. After Tilak died in 1920, Gandhi addressed him as ‘Tilak Maharaj’ (Great King Tilak). He recalled the European dictum, ‘The King is dead; long live the King!’, arguing that this implied that ‘the King never dies and the State machine never stops even for a second.’ Taking a cue from this, and noting how Tilak’s death was being observed by Indian villagers through festivals, music and acclamations of ‘Tilak Maharaj ki jai’(Victory to Great King Tilak), Gandhi suggested that the cremation of Tilak’s body had soon been forgotten, while ‘Tilak Maharaj lives today in the bodies of millions’. Tilak became immortal, as a man ‘who wore out his body in the service of the nation, is never forgotten after his death, he never dies’.19 The sovereignty of the leader was here spread out into the collective sovereignty of the citizenry: in a Kantorowiczian sense, the nation emerged as the regal leader’s immortal body, in the joy of death-refusing sovereignty. In turn, Gandhi Maharaj’s messianic double body offered a vector for popular anger against colonial revenue and rent extraction. War-induced inflation had lowered the purchasing capacities of the poor,20 even as wages remained low.21 The situation deteriorated due to the ‘disastrous monsoon of 1918’.22 Food grains were 93 per cent costlier than in 1914, with comparable rise in prices of piece-goods, thanks to war-time state policies and global factors.23 There was a severe harvest failure too.24 Such disasters affected a society where 71 per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture or pasture, with the rural population amounting to around 90 per cent of India’s total population.25 While British administrators, traders, planters and Indian princes and big landlords enjoyed large incomes, ‘the curve of wealth descends very steeply, and […] enormous masses of the population have little to spare for more than the necessaries of life.’26 Such sharp class differences and rampant (especially rural) poverty provided a fertile terrain for the birth of messianic hopes for the extinction of all heteronomy.

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‘Swaraj Government, which was [believed] to come into being in 1922’ was accordingly framed by peasants across India as a polity where ‘the payment of rent and revenue would be no longer required of them’.27 As the emblem of this polity, Gandhi was transformed in Gujarat and the United Provinces into a miracle-producing god.28 In Awadh, as Gyan Pandey has shown, peasants characterised the future kingdom (rajwa) of Baba Ramchandra, who organized a peasant movement here, as a utopian time of mirth (maja).29 In Rajasthan and Gujarat, ‘tribal’ Bhils were inspired by similar visions of Gandhian rulership, though, as David Hardiman has noted, Gandhi discouraged their radicalism.30 In the Andhra-Orissa borderland, Gond rebels hoped that Jagannatha would reincarnate as Kalki, thus transforming Orissa’s traditional state deity into a messianic figure for their anti-colonial future polity.31 In Bengal, peasants widely saw Gandhi as an avatara or divine incarnation who could not be killed by the British.32 Many thought that ‘Gandhi was invulnerable and could be in two places at the same time.’33 The Governor of Bengal noted in 1921 that the idea of Gandhi as a divine incarnation was gaining increasing popularity among the masses.34 In 1922, he informed the Secretary of State for India that peasants across Bengal were speaking about the arrival of Gandhi Raj, and thus refusing to pay rents, taxes and debts.35 Hitesranjan Sanyal has recorded that villagers in Bengal ritually worshipped Gandhi’s portraits, regarded places associated with him as seats of divinity and thought that chanting his name would heal the diseased.36 Newspapers in Bengal dutifully reported rumours about Gandhi’s magical powers circulating in the United Provinces and Bihar, including his supposed protection from government bullets and his ability to bring a dead man to life.37 Nationalist rebels in prison constantly acclaimed Gandhi through shouts of ‘Gandhi Maharaj ki Jai’.38

Gandhi’s messianic kingship gained traction among the working classes as well, at a time of war-induced economic crises, including lowering of real wages. There was a spike in working class radicalism in this era, manifested especially through strikes.39 A government report noted: It was a universal practice throughout India for labour crowds convened for definitely labour purposes, to raise shouts of “Gandhi Maharaj-ki-Jai” and other political cries. The appeal of Non-co-operation to the masses was heard at any rate by the industrial population of the larger cities.40

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During a rebellion by tea-garden labourers in Assam in 1921, the coolies ‘demanded large increases in their pay’ and ‘left the gardens’, affirming that ‘Gandhi had chartered a steamer to take them to their homes’ and that British Raj had been succeeded by Gandhi Raj. The coolies seemingly feared ‘being turned into mud or stone’ if they did not leave work.41 In colonial eyes, these were ‘thousands of simple and ignorant labourers, looking for the advent of the “Gandhi Raj”, when all should eat without toiling and rest without intermission’.42

Gandhi was himself ambivalent about such peasant and working class militancy. His decision to withdraw the Non-Cooperation movement, after crowd violence resulted in the death of twenty-two policemen in Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces in February 1922, was sharply criticised by many of his contemporaries. Subsequent leftist scholarship has related this withdrawal to the Congress’s Bardoli resolution, urging Indians to pay rents to zamindars. It has been argued that the Congress leadership, epitomised by Gandhi, was ultimately socially conservative and elitist in its aims: it feared that popular militancy would go out of control and turn into a full-fledged revolution.43 Subaltern Studies scholars, notably Shahid Amin and Gyan Pandey, have differentiated between peasant radicalism, organized around messianic images of Gandhi, and the historical figure of Gandhi, whose politics, like that of the Congress elites, often sought to rein in this popular radicalism.44 However, one can overestimate the image/reality binary. As Shruti Kapila has rightly observed: ‘It is not entirely possible to separate Gandhi from his image.’ For Kapila, Gandhi’s forging of an ascetic subjectivity produced an ‘excess’ of subjecthood, facilitating ‘the power of the image’.45 I would also suggest that different classes and communities in colonial India, despite their divergent interests, could, at certain conjunctures, come together around shared political goals, which were ventriloquised through messianic visions of rulership. Though Gandhi professed non-violence, the eschatological focus of his (and his associates’) speeches and writings was undoubtedly designed to provoke militancy against colonialism. Scholars have offered us creative insights into the tensions between this militancy and avowals of non-violence, as also between Gandhian notions of freedom and discipline.46 I would here just quote a relevant (and, in its way, poignant) British government report. It noted how ‘the emissaries of non-cooperation’ preached non-violence, but incited people to defy ‘the authority of the State’ and acquire ‘immediate Swaraj’.

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Everywhere they invoked the magic of Mr Gandhi’s name thereby strengthening, whether consciously or unconsciously, the belief of the credulous masses in his miraculous powers. Thousands of ignorant and humble persons, whether dwellers in the city or in the countryside, were fired with enthusiasm for the great “Mahatma”, whose kingdom when it came, would bring them prosperity, affluence and a respite from labour. Little wonder that while eagerly drinking in the tales of Government’s iniquity and oppression, they set small store by admonitions against the use of violence.

The report confessed that Gandhi, ‘ignoring the terrible potentialities of his campaign, continued to extol the virtues of soul-force, love, and non-violence’.47

The Khilafat movement further contributed to this ethos of messianic radicalism, transforming the question of the Ottoman Empire into a revolutionary debate about divine sovereignty and its messianic interruption of worldly politics. The British, of course, sought to downgrade the status of the Ottomans in Muslim thought.48 Hence, the Government of India sent articles authored by European scholars to the Government of Bengal, and from there to district and subdivision officers and to heads of departments. Colonial officers were advised to use these essays while talking to local Muslims. The essays sought to convince Muslims that they should not be disturbed if the Ottoman Sultan were stripped of his temporal powers, since he could still retain his spiritual authority: the later Abbasid khalifas were cited as examples. In the process, the articles tried to re-map Islamic political authority through novel Europe-derived spiritual/temporal, church/state, binaries. They also argued that not all Muslims, in the past or the present, had recognised the Ottomans as khalifas: the Shias did not, neither did the Wahabis, the Mahdists in Sudan and the Arabs of the Hijaz, Palestine and Syria who had revolted against Ottoman rule in 1915. The ruler of Morocco claimed to be a khalifa himself, as, in the past, did various sultans of Delhi and Bengal, Sher Shah and the Mughal rulers. But as the writer of one such essay, Arnold Toynbee, confessed, such facts were unlikely to persuade Muslims, given that their interest in the Ottoman state did not arise from ‘antiquarian zeal’, but because it was the only Muslim ‘great power’ which could resist Europeans.49 Indian Muslims ultimately turned the Khilafat issue into a contest between the divine monarch and the human one. Against the monistic sovereignty and exclusivist political loyalty claimed by the modern-Western state – here, the British imperial state – was now posed the equally monistic and exclusivist

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sovereignty of God. India thus became one of the key originary sites in the twentieth-century world for the construction of modern ideas of pan-Islamic political sovereignty, articulated as an earthly expression of God’s universal sovereignty, and in challenge to European colonialism. Replacing layered structures of human authority, and loosening their bonds of allegiance to the polyarchy of territorialised regimes of power, Muslim rebels proclaimed the direct sovereignty of God over the world in an unmediated chain of command that linked divinity to citizenry, sharpening monotheistising tendencies in Indian Islam. Abul Kalam Azad thus declared in Lahore in 1915 that Muslims ‘owed their duty to God alone’ and to no ‘earthly power’.50 In the Muslim League session of 1919 at Amritsar, Muhammad Ali claimed that Muslims ‘were subjects of God and not of Great Britain’.51 Abdul Hafiz, in a speech in Dacca in 1920, counterpoised God and Prophet Muhammad against the ‘earthly king’.52 Shaukat Ali, in his presidential address to the Khilafat Conference at Hyderabad (Sind) in 1921, declared that according to ‘divine command’, ‘neither the [British] King is our King nor we are his subjects.’53

The British court trial of the Ali brothers, in 1921, staged a dramatic juridical contestation about sovereignty.54 The Shankaracharya of Sharada Peeth, a Hindu religious leader who had been arrested by the British government, described the trial as a contest of ‘God Versus Man’, which pitted the followers of God against ‘that temporal Power’ which was ‘now out to dethrone and banish’ God from the world.55 In the course of the trial, Muhammad Ali referred to Islamic traditions and to royal proclamations issued by Victoria, Edward VII and George V, to argue for freedom of faith and conscience of Muslims; he pointed to the King-Emperor’s portrait in the court room to demand that the colonial state live up to its promise of protecting the faith of the people. The British, by fighting against the khilafat and by forcing Indian Muslims to kill Muslims from other lands, had violated their promises, according to Ali, and justifiably aroused opposition. For Ali (he cited passages such as Al-Ma’ida, AnNisa, Al-Furqan and Al-Isra of the Quran, and various hadiths), for a Muslim to kill a brother Muslim, or indeed any innocent human being, was to incur the sin of Cain in killing Abel; the British were forcing Muslims to do this, and therefore needed to be resisted.56 His clinching argument was that ‘Islam recognizes one sovereignty alone, the sovereignty of God, which is supreme and unconditional, indivisible and inalienable.’ ‘This sovereignty of God was carried on in His name’ by the prophets, and by ‘his [Prophet Muhammad’s]

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Khulafa or successors’, the present successor being ‘his Imperial Majesty the Sultan of Turkey’.57 Citing the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ‘captivity’ of the Pope (after the annexation of the Papal States by Italy, leading to the Pope’s loss of temporal power), Muhammad Ali argued that it would be wrong to similarly ‘Vaticanise’ the khalifa by presenting him only as ‘the Spiritual head of a branch of the Church of Islam’. He felt that the British were trying to reformulate Islamic institutions by imposing Christian church-state and spiritual-temporal binaries on them; this went against the grain of the khilafat ideal which combined the temporal and the spiritual authorities. The Mahdi (the messianic being who would come at the end-time to defeat the forces of evil led by Dajjal), according to a hadith, was himself to be such a khalifa of God.58

Muhammad Ali emphasised the need for obedience to divine sovereignty – to the ‘doctrine of unity’ – by recounting how Ali (the Prophet’s son-in-law) had suggested that a Muslim should cut off even a khalifa’s head if the latter demanded disobedience to God. He felt that, inspired by similar ideals, English Puritans had beheaded Charles I. Muslims could live under non-Muslims rulers, but only if the latter did not demand ‘disobedience’ to God:59 We owed a duty to God and we owed a duty to the Empire and in the last resort when the demands of the Imperial Government came into direct conflict with the demands of the universal Government of God, as Musalmans we could only obey God and I am endeavouring to do so to the best of my humble capacity.60 Is God’s law for a British Subject to be more important or the King’s law – a man’s law? Call him His Majesty or His Imperial Majesty – exalt him as much as you like – show all obedience to him – show him all the loyalty you can – pay him all the respect – entertain even superstitions about him if you like – but the question is – in this respect – are these superstitions going to stand even for the slightest moment in the way of loyalty which every human being owes to God?61

With a climactic intensity, Ali declared: ‘The trial is not “Mohamed Ali and six others vs. the Crown” but ‘God vs. Man.’ This case is therefore between God and Man. […] The whole question is – ‘Shall God dominate over man or man shall dominate over God.’62 He observed that there was a ‘social or civil contract’ which bound rulers and gave ‘rights to the subjects’. Invoking Stuart ‘tyrannies’ and the English Civil War, he critiqued (without directly naming

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Hobbes, but alluding to Hobbesian arguments through a deft cross-citation of Tennyson) the belief in ‘“a state of nature” “red in tooth and claw,” from which the sovereign has rescued us.’ Instead of such a state of nature, Ali posited a pre-existing government of divine law which bound sovereigns, including the British state. Islam affirmed this legal ideal, providing ‘a code of right conduct for all men, and not separate codes for those who are to be Kings and those who are to be subjects’.63 For Ali, this divine law allowed religious patriots and political communities to rebel. The idea of equality ‘for all men’ before law, of inalienability of religious and civic rights, was thus framed at the intersections of universalistic notions of rule of law and of specifically Islamic visions of theology and political philosophy. Ali insisted that people could not owe to Caesar or King George the first duty, since they owed that to God; ‘God is the sole Ruler.’ For Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Jews, obedience to God was a superior imperative over duty to human rulers.64 In this juridical dramaturgy, the British court was conceptualised as the court of Pilate trying Jesus, and contrasted to the court of God which would try everyone on ‘Judgment Day’.65 In this epiphanic vision, God asserted himself as the sole monarch to put an end to colonialism: Well, gentlemen, my defence is before my God and my fellow-countrymen. Here we are now at the bar of this Court as prisoners and accused persons. But when before the judgment seat of God, the judge, the jury, the accused, all the co-accused, the P. P. and his assistant, the king himself—everybody is assembled and God asks ( Urdu ) “Whose is dominion to-day”—what will be your answer? You will say. “Thine is the Power, the Glory.—Thine the kingdom, Thine the Dominion.” You pray now “Thy Kingdom come”. But, gentlemen, His Kingdom has come. God’s Kingdom has come. God’s Kingdom is here even to-day. It is not the kingdom of king George, but God’s and you must decide on that basis and I must act on that assumption.66

During the trial, Shaukat Ali similarly suggested that the Non-Cooperation movement made explicit an essential relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom: ‘The non-co-operation movement was started from the first of October last, and personally I like to tell you that from August last I am a free man. […] I am a subject of God and a free citizen of India.’67 He further argued that when ‘Government interfered with my faith and conscience, ipso facto my allegiance to the King and Government was withdrawn.’68 By drawing on Islamic theology and on the conceptual resources opened up by the

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Khilafat-Non-Cooperation movement, the Ali Brothers ultimately offered a new paradigm for challenging positive law and state sovereignty in the name (simultaneously) of divine law, divine sovereignty and inalienable human rights to freedom of conscience and freedom to refuse to kill fellow human beings. The trial made plausible new grounds of rights-consciousness, even as it highlighted the expansiveness as well as communitarian limits of theologically-grounded intellection.

From this standpoint of divine sovereignty, the British were cast as malevolent figures. In 1921, Muhammad Ali thus denounced colonial rule as ‘Ravan Raj ’, ‘a rule of demons’.69 In contrast, was the ecumenically acceptable figure of Gandhi: in Shaukat Ali’s words, in a speech at Delhi in 1921, he was India’s sardar;70 or, in the declaration of Akram Khan, editor of the newspaper Muhammadi (in 1921, at a meeting in Bankra), the God-selected leader.71 In 1922, Khilafat activists proclaimed Gandhi as their dictator,72 though Gandhi disavowed the title.73 There were also plans to institute monarchic rulers to actualise Indo-Islamic sovereignty. In 1921, a conference of Muslim ulama in Patna decided to appoint amirs in each district, headed by ‘an Amir-i-Shariat or provincial leader’. An amir-i-shariat (Shah Badruddin) was indeed appointed for Bihar and Orissa, but the plan of replicating this in other provinces, with the apex of hierarchy in a ‘Sheikh-ul-Hind’ for all of India, fell through. The British attributed this failure to tensions between Abul Kalam Azad (who allegedly hoped to be the sheikh-ul-hind), the Ali Brothers and Abdul Bari.74 At the end of the year, at a Jamiat-ul-Ulema meeting at Budaun, the plan was again floated to appoint an amir-i-shariat, who (according to a British report) ‘would possess quasi-Papal powers and would be at the head of the Indian Maulvis but would be governed by a definite constitution’. But this effort too failed to take off.75 As in the case of an earlier 1900s moment (typified by Surendranath Banerjea’s failed coronation bid), so now, efforts to build a real monarchy ran aground due to factional conflicts among Indian political actors. As Muhammad Ali’s trial speeches show, a human monarchy was also difficult to achieve thanks to the power of constitutionalist notions of divine and popular-civic sovereignty that had deep roots in Indo-Muslim imagination.

Messianic monarchy found valence in the presence-absence of real life anti-colonial kingship. Lord Ronaldshay, Governor of Bengal, wrote to Viceroy Chelmsford in 1919 about maulavis who were travelling on boats and preaching in eastern Bengal villages. A prophecy which had become ‘household knowledge’

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and ‘common-place’ among Muslims in Bengal, spoke of a war which would erupt in Asia Minor after the fall of Constantinople: the Mahdi and the Messiah would come and establish Islam across the world. Ronaldshay feared that the removal of the Ottoman Sultan from Constantinople would exacerbate such prophecies.76 In 1920, in a speech at the Khilafat Conference in Calcutta attended by five to six thousand people, Maulana Abdul Bari declared that if ‘Constantinople were taken away from the Turks, […] Imam Mehdi would appear and help the Mussalmans’.77 This association of Constantinople – (the second) Rome – with apocalypse had a centuries-old Byzantine, Islamic and European prehistory. Historians have shown how Constantinople’s eschatological significance dated at least to the fifteenth century, when the Byzantine capital was threatened, and ultimately captured, by the Ottomans.78 In the 1910s, its messianic significance got a new life. Abdul Bari also declared, appealing to Quranic authority, that if non-Muslims captured Palestine, the Mahdi would come and slay them.79 As C. M. Naim and M. Naeem Qureshi have shown, similar messianic prophecies (with roots in the sayings of the fifteenth-century Sufi Shah Ni’matullah) about the advent of the Mahdi, the demise of British rule and the triumph of Islam gained traction in the Punjab. Amanullah’s Afghanistan, which entered war with Britain in 1919, stood as a beacon of anti-colonial Muslim kingship across the border, triggering messianic hopes.80 Zafar Ali Khan, editor of the Punjab newspaper Zamindar, declared to a gathering of 30,000 people in 1920 that it ‘was time also for the advent of the Mehdi’; if Indians fulfilled the Non-Cooperation agenda, ‘the Government would perish’. General Dyer, responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, was compared to Yazid, the arch-tyrant in Islamic imagination.81 Ayesha Jalal notes rumours in Sind as well about the Imam Mahdi’s imminent advent.82 In the Malabar Coast of south-western India, a major peasant rebellion broke out in 1921, animated by millenarian hopes, including about the advent of the Mahdi. Stephen Dale and K. N. Panikkar have analysed the ideological and material contexts for Moplah grievances against the British state and the indigenous landlords.83 The rebels yearned for an end to ‘expensive litigation’, lawyers, ‘present system of police’, and ‘costly buildings and expensive machinery of administration’. They hoped that in ‘our new State there shall be no private property’.84 The ultimate goal was ‘to establish an independent Khilafat kingdom in Malabar’.85 Violently suppressed, the insurgency showed the socio-economic anxieties and aspirations that underwrote much of popular Mahdi-centred hopes in this phase.

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Not surprisingly, the Communist movement in India also emerged, at least in part, through the channels of utopian hope opened up by the Khilafat-NonCooperation movement. In 1920, the Communist Party of India was formally born at Tashkent, then capital of Soviet Turkestan. Initial recruits to the party included Hindu-origin anti-colonial militants (like M. N. Roy)86 and Muslims with a Khilafat background. Among the latter were muhajirs who, to demonstrate their anger against British rule, had immigrated across north-western India and Afghanistan into Turkestan. A few of them reached Moscow and met Lenin and Trotsky.87 Some became noted Communist leaders later.88 Soviet authorities appealed to the muhajirs in the name of a ‘proletarian dictatorship which was to bring a worldly paradise to the suffering poor’,89 while the ulama at Tashkent suggested ‘that Communism stood for the same principles as Islamic teaching’.90 Such intersections between Islam and Communism stretched into the interiors of South Asia, creating the networks that allowed for the emergence of new messianic hopes. In Bengal, as Suchetana Chattopadhyay has shown, lower class Muslims (often immigrants from the Bengal countryside to Calcutta) found in Communism platforms of sociability as well as ideologies of resistance to British and high-caste Hindu elites. Among pioneer Bengali Muslim socialists were Muzaffar Ahmad, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Abdul Halim.91

Such actors facilitated intellectual dialogues between Islamic and Communist visions of utopian community across the 1920s. Maulavi Mohammad Fakir, the Allahabad delegate at the Bombay Khilafat Conference of 1920, thus compared Lenin to Prophet Muhammad, and like many others in the conference, aligned Islam with Bolshevism.92 A government report noted: ‘Educated Muhammadans are naturally sympathetic to this [Communist] movement, as, according to the leaders like Shah Badiul Alam of Chittagong and others Bolshevism is based upon the same principle of universal brotherhood as is preached by Islam.’ Such socialist-inspired Muslims often read the Quran along Communist lines.93 A manifesto published in 1926 by the Communist Party of India cast Islam as ‘the rise of mass consciousness under the slogan of equality, fraternity and brotherhood’, and presented Ali, the fourth khalifa and son-in-law of the Prophet, as a quasi-socialist leader who led ‘the proletarian movement’ which was crushed at Karbala.94 The British responded to such crossroads of Islam and Communism through the Peshawar trials (1922–27) and the Kanpur Conspiracy trial (1924).95 Nazrul Islam’s writings represent perhaps the greatest Bengali literary

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expressions of messianic authority which emerged at the crossroads of IndoIslamic and socialist utopian hopes in this epoch. They had wide currency as anti-colonial propaganda; colonial intelligence officers often singled out the messianic/apocalyptic passages in these writings as especially inflammable revolutionary material.96 The poem ‘Korbani’ (1920), for example, portrayed anti-colonial satyagraha as the cosmic dance of the god Bhairava and as harbinger of pralaya and qiyamat (the Indic and Islamic end-time). Indian rebels and the people of Rome (Rumvasi, that is, the Ottoman people who had inherited the mantle of the Roman Empire, and whose fate had eschatological implications in the Khilafat movement) were cast as sacrificial lambs in this transformation.97 Works like ‘Vidrohi’ (1921–22) and ‘Agamani’ (1921) mixed Indic and Islamic apocalyptic imageries to instigate rebellion against the British.98 Yugavani (1920–1922) announced the incarnation of divinity in human form, and especially as oppressed people who desired freedom. Nazrul placed Indians within a global landscape of campaigns for revolution and national independence, which embraced Russians, Irish and Turks: these heralded, for him, the end-time announced by the Hindu god Shiva and by the Islamic angel Israfil. The poor and the rebel were seen as the avataras and mujaddids who would create the new world. The book remained banned from 1922 to 1947.99 The author, who was editing the newspaper Dhumketu from 1922 till his arrest in early 1923, was condemned for preaching Bolshevism.100 In Bisher Bnashi (1920–24), the poet presented the Indian revolutionary as an avatara and a narayana-nara (the god Narayana-Vishnu in human form) who would bring swaraj. The spinning wheel, a symbol of Indian manufacture and resistance to British industry, was depicted as Vishnu’s discus.101 Such ideas about divine incarnation and apocalyptic gods (like Shiva-Rudra) were considered ‘highly objectionable’ by the colonial authorities.102 Deemed seditious, the collection was proscribed from 1924 to 1945. 103 Nazrul’s imagination, which expansively combined Indic, Islamic and modern democratic tropes, was ultimately embedded in a theological schema which synonymised Hindu gods with Islamic angels. Brahma and Gabriel represented divine speech and revelation, Vishnu and Michael the martial power of divinity, while Shiva and Israfil represented the divine power of destruction and apocalypse. The Goddess was cast as the shakti (power) of the trinity.104 Like Muhammad Ali’s trial, Nazrul’s prosecution by the colonial state – he lay in prison from January to December 1923105 – also produced a debate on

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the relative claims of the divine and human monarchs. Nazrul’s prison testimony Rajbandir Jabanbandi (1923) suggested that the raja or samrat, the human king or emperor, epitomised by the Crown (mukuta), was opposed by God, who was the raja of rajas and the judge of judges. Invoking danda (whose importance in Indian nationalist intellection on sovereignty we saw in Chapter 3), the poet saw in his trial a fundamental conflict between the king, wielding rajdanda (royal sceptre) and truth (satya), wielding the nyayadanda (the rod of justice), between the human judge, working through ain (state law), and the divine judge, working on the basis of nyaya (justice). Convinced that God was on his side, Nazrul compared his trial and punishment to those of Jesus and Gandhi. He defined his body as the seat of divinity and the landscape of pralaya. His role was to manifest the truth (satyer prakashika), even as truth was also selfmanifest (satya svayam prakasha).106 This identification of the imprisoned rebel body with godhood was based on an elaborate metaphysics of seeing the divine. In undated and unpublished manuscript notes (but which were definitely written years after the trial, even if some of the strands of thinking were present in Nazrul’s mind already in the early 1920s), Nazrul presented ‘vision of God’, ruyat, or bhagavaddarshana as synonymous terms that indicated how God was made manifest (prakasha) and visible to sight (darshana), like the divine light mentioned in the An-Nur passage of the Quran. Nazrul noted (in English) that God ‘is manifest in all. And everything has emanated from this. He is the first and the last and nothing exists except him’. He equated the Islamic abul-arwah with the Indic paramatman or ‘the soul in which all souls are included’, and brahman with Allah; sounds like om and Allah Hu represented the identity of the individual soul with the divine.107 Nazrul drew some of this theology from a mid-seventeenth-century Persian text, the Mughal Prince Dara Shikoh’s Majma-ul-Bahrain, a masterpiece which established equivalences between Sufi-Islamic and Indian philosophy. Nazrul seems to have relied on the pioneer English translation, with edition of the Persian original, produced in 1929 by M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, a Lecturer of Arabic and Persian in Presidency College, Calcutta (with some help from Bengali Hindu Sanskritists), and published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal.108 This is evident in Nazrul’s references to English phraseology (for example, the English quotations above) drawn from here; he also cited some of the original Persian and Arabic terminology. There was thus an extraordinary transaction between early modern Islamic-Indic philosophical exchanges – anchored in a

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Mughal scholar-prince’s polyglot oecumene – and the resurgence of IslamicAdvaita dialogue – anchored in Indian trans-sectarian scholarly cooperation and poetics – in early-twentieth century Bengal.

However, one should not underestimate Nazrul’s originality. Ultimately, his poetics was embedded in a very creative political eschatology and metaphysics (much of which predated the 1929 text). It was this ethical-theological stance that also inspired his observation in Zulfiqar (1932) that God as light (nuri roshan) could be seen by man in the mirror of his soul (ruhani ayna). Man by recognising his own self (khod) could recognise God (khoda). By seeing this divine beauty (rupa) Mansur Hallaj had gone mad and had martyred his life crying anal haqq (I am truth).109 I would argue that Nazrul ultimately used Islamic-Indic equivalences to sketch a modern theory of sovereignty: this was based on the direct manifestation and visualisation of divine sovereignty in common human beings, and especially in anti-colonial rebels. Obviously, this facilitated an anticolonial and democratic understanding of sovereignty. The political correlate of this was the radical assertion of human equality. Nazrul thus cast Islam as a faith based on ‘democracy (ganatantravada), fraternity of all (sarvajanina bhrartrtva), and the doctrine of equal rights for all (samanadhikaravada)’.110 Various poems in Samyavadi (1925) asserted the equality (samya) of all human beings, in each of whom God was manifest (prakasha): thus every human being was a potential avatara and a prophet. Nazrul related divine or sacred human figures to occupations they sometimes had, inversed this equation, and now identified every shepherd with Krishna and with Muslim prophets, the peasant with Balarama, the lower caste Chandal or beggar and his wife with Shiva and the Goddess, prostitutes with revered women from Hindu myths.111 He specially advocated gender equality: ‘I sing the song of equality – In my eyes there is no difference between men and women.’112

In an editorial for his newspaper Dhumketu, published in 1922, Nazrul redefined svaraj as the kingship of every human being: ‘What is svaraj? Svaraj means, one is oneself king or everyone is king’ (svaraj mane, nijei raja ba sabai raja). The editorial went on to stress that human beings should refuse to recognise any foreign (videshi) or indigenous (svadeshi) ruling group as a master: it was crucial to recognise the divinity (bhagavan) in oneself, rather than see the divine as an external deity (devata) or a human master. Only thus could one become capable of ushering in pralaya to forge revolution (vidroha). If one regarded another as one’s master, one lost one’s self (sva-hin), one became a

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denier of the self (nastika: literally, one who denies existence; in popular usage, atheist). The goal was to become a king (raja) and not to remain someone who was complicit in one’s own slavery (dasatva) to another. When one ceased to suffer from mental dependence on the other (nirbharata, maner paravalamban), one ceased to be a slave (dasa, ghulam). Nazrul used the precolonial Indic (especially Advaita) concepts of aham-jnana and atmajnana (self-knowledge) to articulate this political self-realisation of oneself – and of all human beings – as kings, as masterly beings and not slaves.113

The theme of pralaya as popular revolution, waged particularly for peasants and labourers, was repeated in Rudramangala (1923).114 Fani Manasa (1921–27) equated revolutionary masses with Krishna and Nrisimha (the man-lion incarnation of Vishnu). Such mythic images also inflected Nazrul’s Bengali adaptation of the socialist anthem L’Internationale (from an American translation), produced in 1927 at Muzaffar Ahmad’s request. A part of the adaptation reads: ‘Breaking the demon’s prison, come, those who have lost all’ (bhedi daitya-kara ay sarvahara). Through a deft use of the word daitya (demon), Nazrul here equated the rebel poor with Krishna in the demon (king) Kamsha’s prison: the anthem thus got a localised messianic embedding.115 In Nazrul’s political thought and theology, collectivised messianism ultimately provided the foundation for democracy, even as apocalypse was re-figured as revolution. For Nazrul, the democratisation of kingship and messianic divinity offered a dialectical erasure of the human/colonial regimes of rulership that made the kingship or mastery of some dependent on the slavery of others. This collectivisation of the messianic mantle was also visible in Iqbal. Faisal Devji has noted: [...] Iqbal was interested in the figure of the god-man, prefigured most strikingly by Jesus as God become man, but also in the messianic figures of Judaism and Islam, though he used the old mystical term of the “perfect man” (insan-i kamil) for him. Indeed there are many places in his verse where Iqbal speaks of man becoming like God, otherwise an unpardonable sin in Islam, verses which, unlike the Christian emphasis on incarnation, assume the ascent of man to divinity rather than God’s descent into humanity.116

Devji has discussed the continuity of such collectivised and democratised messianism in Islamist movements in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century.117 While Nazrul Islam’s views thus need to be placed within a historical

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continuum, there are nevertheless specificities to his ideas, above all in their ecumenical imagination. This owed something to the spirit of the age. I have suggested that the late 1910s and early 1920s constituted a period of intense messianic anticipation in India: a time when many Indians, across frontiers of class and community, united in a collective eschatological urge with the desire for overthrowing colonial rulers. Indian rebels identified their destinies with those of the wider Islamic world, with the Soviet Union and with other revolutionary societies, even as they drew on South Asian conceptual repertoires, myths and forms of community organization.

Dissonances between elite politics and subaltern radicalism and between Hindu-Indian and Indo-Islamic nationalism, introduced severe fractures in this anti-colonial front. The withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation movement in 1922 embodied these schisms, pitting peasant insurgency against Congress notions of discipline and order, and fostering disaffection among Muslim rebels. Practices and discursive tropes of theologically-articulated violence expressed popular grievances against diverse nodes of oppression, but also exacerbated the atmosphere of sectarian militancy across South Asia in the long run. Moreover, in spite of increased female participation, the political leadership as well as the messianic imaginaries remained largely masculine. In spite of these limitations, the wave of insubordination produced in this period played a critical role in democratising politics in the next decades. Liberal rhetoric of national selfdetermination, especially as articulated by the American President Woodrow Wilson, had only a limited role here.118 Socialist-Communist and religious networks and visions were more important in creating a polyphonic ‘utopian moment’ in India when many rebels, with differing ideals of justice, thought of realising perfection in man and society. Discourses on messianic and divine rulership enabled them to claim the plenitude of power, and grounded notions of collective sovereignty, civic rights and revolution in ancient as well as modern grammars of moral and utopian authority.

5.3 Ascetic-divine rulership, elite nationalism and peasant militancy: Late 1920s to 1940s This section focuses on concepts and rituals of ascetic, messianic and divine rulership which emerged in India, and especially in Bengal, between the late 1920s and late 1940s. These were rooted, at least in part, in severe economic crises (from the Great Depression to the Bengal Famine of 1943) which

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devastated large sections of the populace, and especially the peasantry, produced radical hopes and anxieties – including, messianic-inflected ones – among militant peasants as well as among elite Hindu and Muslim nationalists, and often (though, crucially, not always) provoked the latter to channelise class tensions, and especially peasant militancy, into sectarian conflicts in order to further elite-nationalist programmes of state-building.

In northern India, symptoms of acute crisis – famine and scarcity – were already visible in 1929–30, accompanied by fall in prices, especially of exportable commodities like ‘raw and manufactured jute, raw cotton, oil-seeds, tea, cereals, pulses, and hides and skins’. Agriculture-dependent social groups were prime victims, but Indian industries were also affected.119 Industrial slump, resulting in lowering of wages and loss of employment, furthered tensions between working classes and industrial capitalists.120 The economic slump continued into 1930–31, showing how far ‘the economic structure of rural India is now linked to that of the rest of the world, and can be dislocated by world influences’. There was a colonial specificity too, in so far as countries which mainly exported raw materials (like India) were hit stronger than more industrialised nations.121 In 1931–32, ‘cultivators and tenants had serious difficulty in finding the cash with which to meet their obligations of rent or revenue’. In this milieu, the Congress increased its appeal by urging the state to lower the land revenue by half, and give total relief to small owners.122 The fall in prices, and especially that of agricultural goods (greater compared to that of the manufactured products which India mainly imported), continued into 1932–33.123 In 1933–34, ‘Indian conditions generally showed some progress towards recovery, although there was little or no improvement in the agricultural position.’124 Obviously, to understand the messianic concepts and militancy of the 1930s, it is important to locate India within a wider ‘global’ history of the Great Depression.125 While there were basic differences between authoritarian politics in Europe or Japan, and anti-colonial politics in India, it is nevertheless possible to situate them within a common context of dissatisfaction with global free trade capitalism. In India, these grievances often translated into yearning for a charismatic, protective and even militant rulership. But the Indian situation of colonial subordination, incomplete and fragmented elite hegemony, and partial autonomy of peasant power prevented the formation of an authoritarian state apparatus as happened in many European societies and in Japan. Democratic politics of various sorts remained resilient in interwar India.

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The experience of colonial heteronomy often provoked many Indian nationalist activists to mobilise around messianic tropes. Often, these activists hailed from social elites, such as Hindu high-caste groups: they were either unwilling or unable to connect their anti-colonial politics to popular (such as peasant or working class) agendas. In this context, their individuated acts of violent rebellion – including political assassinations, robberies and bombings – against the British frequently met with failure, and ended in their imprisonment and/or execution. But they earned the heroic status of martyrs, and were venerated across India. In the 1930s, Bengal produced many such militants, though Punjab and northern India were also significant nodes.126 Gradually, some of these militants swerved towards socialism: Bhagat Singh of Punjab was an emblematic figure who, in addition, became, after his execution by the British in 1931, the centre of a widespread nationalist martyrology.127 In Bengal, some of them moved towards Communism, including, famously, Promode Dasgupta.128 A British official noted in 1933: ‘there is little doubt that the terrorist of yesterday is going to be the communist of today.’129 An examination of colonial archives reveals that these militant groups – and their sympathisers in the Indian nationalist press – often framed their activities in messianic terms. They deployed temporalities of apocalypse (pralaya) to conceptualise the hunger and destitution to which colonial economic policies had reduced Indians, and to frame their own mission as a messianic one. Living rebels and dead martyrs were compared to Shiva, the Goddess and various incarnations of Vishnu (Nrisimha, Parashurama, Krishna, Kalki), as well as to mythical and historical rulers like Rama, Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Rani of Jhansi. The American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Irish liberation struggle were also lionised. These militant propaganda tracts and related newspaper reports ultimately combined mythical and historical references with empirical depictions of the misery of Indians (consequent to a colonial political economy, aggravated by the Great Depression). To many Indian nationalists, the Depression thus heralded a terrifying, but also empowering, sense of apocalypse: an almost eschatological clarion call for immediate rebellion against the empire.130 One way we can gauge the spread of socialist-Communist ideologies in these militant anti-colonial circles is by looking at subtle shifts in ideals of messianic rulership. From the late 1920s, many of these discourses increasingly democratised and ‘subalternised’ messianism. For example, a journal from 1930

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portrayed Vishnu as allied with working class men and women in a popular revolution.131 Other journals compared labourers and peasants to Shiva,132 depicted the poor as waging Krishna’s war,133 announced a Communist Shudra king, and fused images of Shiva and Lenin.134 Divine advent was now expected to give mastery of the world to the poor.135 Nazrul Islam was exemplary: his apocalyptic and messianic writings increasingly identified the divine in peasants, labourers and lower caste individuals, even as he called for the messianic everyman to rise up in revolt against exploitation. Such incendiary writings earned him a prison sentence, though he was released thanks to a pact between Viceroy Irwin and Gandhi.136 Communist influence, however, also worked the other way: in substituting messianic prose with a more sedate language of socialist rationality to justify rebellion.137

In the early 1930s, Gandhi regained a certain messianic appeal across India, in the context of the Civil Disobedience movement, though this was less intense than had been the case during the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat phase. In Gujarat, Gandhi was often seen as someone sent by the gods and as an avatara. To an extent, Gandhi himself fostered such a sacralised imaginary. He thus compared his famous Dandi March of 1930, to break the British government’s salt tax law, to a yajna (sacrifice) for establishing Ramarajya or dharmarajya for the poor and as darshana (sacred seeing) of the deity of swaraj. Like many other contemporaries, Gandhi too increasingly democratised this language of ritual, by, for example, insisting on darshana of divinity as present in the people, and especially in lower caste groups and in those belonging to sectarian minorities. He also invoked Jesus as a model rebel (against imperial Rome), even as – in interwar Europe and North America – many began to see Gandhi as a latter-day Christ.138

In Bengal, as Tanika Sarkar’s researches have revealed in vivid detail, Gandhi’s name acquired an almost autonomous messianic potency, including, and perhaps especially, among those who resorted to violent militancy. For example, during the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 1930, the rebels announced the advent of Gandhi’s raj.139 There was ‘an almost apocalyptic note’, and hope about the end of British rule, in parts of Bengal, and especially in Midnapore, in the early 1930s.140 Sarkar has also shown the messianic presence in the Santal movement in the Malda district of Bengal. The movement had begun much before the Civil Disobedience era, but intensified in the early 1930s. The rebels wished for an end to their rent obligations as well as for political

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freedom, embodied through the utopian kingdom of Jitu Santal. In 1932, they occupied the celebrated Adina Mosque, and announced the replacement of British sovereignty by Gandhi raj. One may argue that, during the last phase of the Santal insurrection, Jitu transfigured himself into a messianic Gandhian sovereign, appropriating the logic of darshana as a space for constructing and displaying sovereignty: a logic we have detected earlier in figures as diverse as Rabindranath, Nazrul Islam and Gandhi. Jitu ‘would give darshan to his disciples, sitting at the charkha [spinning wheel]. At the Adina mosque he called himself Gandhi and proclaimed Gandhi’s raj’. The British put the rebellion down violently, and Jitu was killed.141

An important impetus behind such sacred visions of sovereignty was provided by a category of actors whom the colonial archives branded as the ‘political sannyasi’ or ‘political sadhu’. Colonial administrators found their prototypes in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s writings, in the RamakrishnaVivekananda movement, and in various ascetic actors and organizations across contemporaneous Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and the United Provinces. The state suspected these ascetics of either directly encouraging anti-British rebellion or of providing a refuge to such militants.142 Typically, and especially in the interwar years, nationalist asceticism was spatially organized into ashrama complexes: increasingly, these also concerned themselves with education, healthcare, sanitation, rural renewal and similar services, often directed towards the poor and lower caste and ‘tribal’ populations. Some became centres of intellectual production; many were kept under police surveillance. Celebrated examples include Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan-Sriniketan complex,143 Aurobindo Ghose’s ashrama at Pondicherry,144 and Gandhian ashramas, as in Ahmedabad and Sevagram.145 The ashrama was the archetypal spatial expression of ascetic rulership. Occasionally, as in the Ramakrishna Temple (1935–38) in Belur Math, the world headquarters of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement, the architecture of ascetic nationalism assumed a visibly regal tone, incorporating Rajput and Mughal royal architecture as well as Christian church design.146 Interwar political asceticism had older roots too. Ascetic organizations had wielded significant political, social and military authority in Mughal India: the Sikhs embodied only the most celebrated instantiation of this model of ascetic sovereignty. The British aimed, with only limited success, at suppressing these militant ascetic orders and institutions.147 As Malavika Kasturi has shown, the

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category of ‘asceticism’, as applied in modern India, was itself a result of such colonial interventions which aimed at denuding these actors of their worldly authority and prowess.148 Bearing this critique in mind, I use the term ‘ascetic’ in a capacious way to refer to actors who practised certain forms of disciplined ethical-spiritual behaviour and claimed primacy over others in that regard, but who were not divorced from the material world they inhabited. Indeed, the researches of William Pinch (on the Ramanandis in colonial northern India), Walter Hauser (on Swami Sahajanand) and Aya Ikegame (on mathas and gurus in princely Mysore and postcolonial Karnataka) have shown the extraordinary role that ‘ascetic’ individuals and organizations have played in worldly, and especially non-Brahmin and peasant, politics. They have shown that these ascetics sometimes sought to arrogate, or to bestow on their followers, regalKshatriya status and honours.149 Comparable studies on Bengal still remain something of a desideratum, a gap I hope to address here. Across interwar India, Hindu nationalist asceticism sought to address two major ‘problems’. The first was the growth of non-Brahmin or ‘lower caste’ politics and especially the radical politics of the Depressed Classes. In response, many high-caste actors, including, and especially, those associated with Gandhian nationalism, sought to eradicate the practice of ‘untouchability’, and to promote the ‘uplift’ of lower caste communities in arenas like education, health, hygiene and industry.150 The second factor was the growth of sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, which manifested itself, most tragically, in the form of riots. These increased in intensity from the late 1920s: there were, for example, 22 major ones in 1928–29 and 12 in 1929–30.151 The trend continued well into the 1930s.152 These rivalries were embedded in local tensions (contestations about property, status, forms of religious expression) as well as in translocal tussles between opposed elite-nationalist agendas during an era of accelerating devolution of state powers to Indians. A government report from the early 1930s thus summarised it: Communal tension thus remained acute; Muslim fears of responsibility at the Centre, with its implications of a Hindu raj, intensified; and Congress circles tended to become resentful of the growing possibility that the fruits of their “victory” might have to be sacrificed because of the failure to reach a communal settlement.153

I would embed within this broader context my reading of the dramatic royal ceremonies which were enacted in Bengal and Benares by the Bharat

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Sevashram Sangha, the most politically active Hindu ascetic order of interwar Bengal. I shall foreground their rituals, and especially read their royal liturgies, as sites of intense intellectual production, as zones of political concept-building.

The Bharat Sevashram Sangha has a global presence today, with branches not only in India, but also in Bangladesh, Nepal, Fiji, Britain, Canada, the United States, Trinidad and Guyana: that is, in countries with significant Hindu populations.154 But the movement was born in Bengal, under the leadership of Swami Pranavananda (1896–1941). Pranavananda hailed from a Kayastha landholder family of eastern Bengal. His biographies emphasise his attraction towards Indian nationalism from his youth; he was even briefly imprisoned by the colonial state. His initiation – first by the head of a Natha matha in Gorakhpur, and later by an ascetic of the Puri order in Prayag/Allahabad – reveals the dense sacral connections that linked the Bengal countryside to northern India, and especially the United Provinces. Pranavananda would amplify these networks across his career, connecting Bengal with Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces along a Hindu nationalist religious and political axis. We get a wealth of information about the interwar-era travels and careers of Sangha ascetics when we compare the Sangha’s own records with those of the British state which kept a close surveillance on it. Sangha ascetics moved across British India and various princely states: they focused especially on relief work during natural calamities (like floods) and sectarian riots, on constructing institutions for education and healthcare, as well as on rural reform. They sought, often successfully, to gain a hold over the epicentres of Hindu pilgrimage in northern India, and especially Gaya, Puri and Benares. Pranavananda, and the Sangha more generally, evolved two novel institutions with the aim of forging a Hindu nation (jatigathan): the milan mandir (literally, temple of unity), envisaged as a space where Hindus would gather, cutting across caste barriers; and the rakshi dal (literally, team of protectors), which (according to colonial records) emerged with rapidity from 1938, and trained Hindus to fight with sticks and daggers, and also in boxing, wrestling and jujutsu. These institutions were meant to integrate lower-caste (especially Depressed Classes) Hindus into the Hindu national fold, and to create a militant Hindu community which would fight and ‘defend’ community members against Muslims during the ever-growing sectarian riots. The Sangha had an articulate political programme. It felt that the Congress’s objective of building a secular nation was a pipe-dream unless Hindus could form a united community able to protect itself from aggressors;

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Hindu unity was thus a precondition for a multi-religious India. By the time of his death in 1941, Pranavananda’s favourite politician – almost a political heir – was Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who later established the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main Hindu nationalist political party in India today. Following the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, a horrific wave of sectarian violence that left thousands of Hindus and Muslims dead, Mookerjee encouraged the Sangha to undertake relief work in partnership with the Hindu Mahasabha, a famous Hindu nationalist organization.155 Mookerjee confessed shortly before his death in 1953: ‘I openly admit that in the first years of my political life, he [Pranavananda] gave me special inspiration and power (shakti).’156 Mookerjee’s biographer, Tathagata Roy (a BJP politician himself ), observes that Pranavananda ‘was instrumental to a great extent in Dr. Mookerjee’s entry into mass politics.’ Roy underlines that the Sangha, one of the ‘two […] biggest organized Hindu monastic orders of India’ (the other being the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement), supported Mookerji during his early career.157 Joya Chatterjee has argued that, across the late 1930s and 1940s, the Sangha indeed offered a militant Hindu nationalist political platform for members of the Bengali literati, former anti-colonial militants and even some Congressmen. Sangha accounts describe the Muslim League as the Sangha’s opponent par excellence in this phase, especially during the years when the League was part of the provincial government in Bengal and was seen as instigating anti-Hindu violence across rural and urban centres in Bengal. Outside Bengal, the Sangha also organized or participated in Hindu nationalist meetings in Bihar, United Provinces and Orissa.158

The Sangha developed several rituals to place ascetic-messianic kingship at the heart of this Hindu nationhood. Since 1924, it celebrated gurupuja in Bengal, whereby the guru (preceptor) Pranavananda was worshipped as the god Shiva.159 From 1928, gurupuja was juxtaposed in Benares with Durga Puja, the annual autumnal worship of the Goddess. The rituals involved music and armed dance, replicating Shiva’s apocalyptic tandava. Benares is, of course, the holiest site of Shiva worship in India, and the god is regarded as the city’s ruler. The Sangha staked a powerful claim over the city by identifying its leader with the divine monarch, while enmeshing Bengal in northern Indian sacral politics.160 In 1932, in an even more dramatic ceremony, Pranavananda formally ‘assumed royal dress’ (rajavesha dharan) and was acclaimed as a king at the Sangha headquarters in his natal village of Bajitpur in eastern Bengal.

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Through a model of acclamatory rulership whose lineaments should be familiar to us by now (for example, through the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, the coronation of Surendranath Banerjea, or the ceremonies of the Rajavamshis), the Hindu-Indian nation was constituted here through songs and shouts of victory. Pranavananda was hailed in this acclamatory liturgy of kingship as the ‘king of kings’ (raj raj), ‘great king of the world’ (bhuma maharaj) and ‘lord of the world’ (vishvapati): as a ‘god’ (devata) who had assumed ‘human form’ (narakaya).161 The ceremony climaxed in the mahabhisheka or ‘great anointing’. In the Sangha’s view, abhisheka referred to bathing in consecrated water ‘with the object of acquiring a kingdom’ (rajyadhikarartha). Pranavananda was regarded as Shiva, endowed ‘with the plenitude of godhood’ (purna bhagavadbhave).162 Hence, he sat on a ‘platform of anointment’ (abhisheka-mancha), under a ‘royal parasol’ (rajachhatra). Namashudra leaders (sardar) and ‘protective militias’ (rakshisainyavahini) performed martial feats with shields, tridents, axes, swords, bows and arrows, accompanied by loud roars, making ceremonially manifest ‘the guru of the world as the lord of the righteous empire’ (jagadguru dharmasamrajyer adhishvara). Pranavananda’s feet were washed with water collected from pilgrimage spots in India and Burma and with curd, milk, clarified butter and honey, further articulating the political unity of India (including Burma, which was then part of British India, and had a significant Bengali Hindu diaspora). During the abhisheka he was identified with the ‘cosmic man’ (purusha) with the ‘thousand heads, thousand eyes, thousand feet’ of the Purusha-sukta of Rgveda. I would argue that this hymn of primordial creation of the world was thereby politicised into a liturgy of constructing the Hindu nation. Pranavananda, as the Hindu national sovereign, transfigured into a being who claimed to incorporate and express the will and being of the Hindu multitudes. (This too, in a sense, was the creation of a Leviathan.) I would also relate this to the political use of virat purusha imageries earlier by Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal to conceptualise the sovereign ruler as a primal being who embodied the people, thereby constituting the nation. The Purusha-sukta had also, of course, for centuries provided a traditional Brahmanical justification for the hierarchical division of human beings into the four varnas: it was from four parts (mouth, arms, thighs and feet) of the body of the Purusha that the four varnas had been created according to the Purusha-sukta. At a time when the Sangha was aiming at bringing various castes together into a united Hindu national fold, the (political) re-joining of the (ritually) split castes may also

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have received a sacral sanction through this identification of Pranavananda with Purusha. During the ceremony, verses were also chanted from the Gita, identifying Pranavananda with Vishnu-Krishna and linking the Gita’s discourse on righteous rulership (and war) with the Sangha’s.163

Later, during the annakuta bhoga, Pranavananda was worshipped as Narayana-Vishnu. The subsequent agnihotra yajna involved a sacrifice in a ‘royal court’ (rajasabha-grha); ascetics, celibate initiates and Namashudra troops danced with weapons. Pranavananda received ‘acclamations of victory’ (jayadhvani) as a ‘great preceptor king’ (shrishrigurumaharajji) and as the god Shiva himself. He sat on a royal throne, with a gold crown, golden trident, gold sandals and a royal parasol. To his followers, his ascetic marks signified Shiva, while his royal clothes reminded them of Vishnu ‘establishing the righteous kingdom’ (dharmarajya samsthapan: a reference to the Gita). He was worshipped as Harihara, the icon which combines the two deities in one body, equated with virat purusha, and praised as the ‘lord of sacrifice’ (yajneshvara). In the Sangha’s view, the objective of this royal pageantry was ‘to build a righteous state’ (dharmarashtra gathan), that is, a militant Hindu nation-state.164

In a strict ritual sense, the juxtaposition of Shiva and Vishnu in Pranavananda’s body embodied his dual role as ascetic and ruler. But it is likely that this assumption of Vaishnava markers also aimed at drawing in the Namashudras. A martial peasant community ‘famed as clubmen and watchmen’, they occupied a very low rung in the caste hierarchy of eastern Bengal. The British had sought to demilitarise them and transform them into (what a colonial ethnographer described as) ‘a peaceable and exemplary subject of the English Government’.165 From the late-nineteenth century, under the leadership of the Vaishnavainflected Matua sect, the Namashudras had launched a powerful movement of social mobility and struggle against caste oppression.166 It is quite probable that, by supplementing its traditional Shaiva devotion with a Vaishnava theology of rulership, indeed by combining the worship of Shiva and Vishnu into a monotheistic unitary Hindu national godhead (symbolised by reference to the ancient icon of Harihara, and embodied in Pranavananda), the Sangha hoped to channelise the militancy of the Namashudras (which was often directed against high-caste Hindu dominance) into consolidating a Hindu nation. At least one Sangha source conceptualised the Namashudras in this regard as a fallen Kshatriya community, whose precolonial armed prowess (as soldiers in the navies of sixteenth/seventeenth century chieftains) Pranavananda hoped to restore.167

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In 1934, during a second abhisheka ceremony at Bajitpur, the Sangha enlisted other lower caste communities of Bengal, including Tilis, Malis and Rishis. Pranavananda was once more worshipped as an enthroned king; Namashudras held the stage in boat races and armed athletic events with shields and swords.168 The Sangha cast the ceremonies as spaces of creating ritual equality: ‘everyone had equal (saman) claims (dabi), equal rights (adhikara), equal honour (maryada) in every ceremony of the monastery; everyone received equal love and affection from the preceptor.’169 An estimated 50,000–100,000 Namashudras were involved.170 Across the 1930s, through institution of milan mandirs and observation of ceremonial events, Pranavananda worked at bringing into the Sangha fold various Depressed Classes of southern and eastern Bengal, including (apart from the communities already mentioned) Pods or Paundra Kshatriyas and Malla Kshatriyas.171 A speech by Pranavananda, in a meeting in 1938 chaired by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, reveals the rationale underlying his attempt to remove ‘untouchability’. He felt that if Hindus ‘are to survive as a nation (jati), they must immediately bond themselves, through friendship and cooperation, with their brothers from the so-called undeveloped (anunnata) classes, give them the appropriate honour and affection, and stand together against sectarian conflicts’.172 The Sangha tried to Hinduise Santal, Munda and Bauri populations in the Bihar-Bengal borderlands as well.173 To spread their message of Hindu nationalism across Bengal and Upper India, Sangha ascetics adroitly used pilgrimage towns, festivals like Kumbh Mela and ascetic networks; they often invoked mythic and historical Indian kings to justify their nationalist model of rulership.174 It is as a climax of these networks that we can contextualise certain events in 1940 in Benares during the Durga Puja season. Pranavananda had a secret meeting here with Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Sangha records describe this (and a previous meeting in Calcutta) in terms of Mookerjee now succeeding to the ascetic’s political mantle and ‘shakti’; this supposedly enabled him to engineer the Partition of Bengal in 1947, creating a Hindu-majority western Bengal (within India).175 Sangha records speak of yet another transfer of sovereign authority in Benares as well: one from the ascetic to the monastic order as a whole. This supposedly took place during a procession (shobhayatra), as Pranavananda traversed the Vishvanatha (Shiva; literally, lord of the world) temple in Benares, with a ‘royal parasol’ (rajachhatra) above his head and accompanied by troops and ascetics holding weapons and yak-tail fans. In this greatest temple to Shiva

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in India, Pranavananda thus ambitiously enacted his kingship and identification with the god-king. In Sangha eyes, this was also the moment of the transference of the cosmic (virat) body – the sovereign and immortal mystical body – of Pranavananda (whom we saw identified earlier with virat purusha) to the corporate body of the Sangha, even as his mortal body was about to die. This sealed the birth of the Hindu nation as the corporate body of its ascetic king: The ruler of the world Vishvanatha made a great manifestation (mahaprakasha) as the leader of the community (sanghaneta) and as the preceptor (acharya), in order to carry out the welfare of the world, and especially to rebuild the Hindu nation in India (bharate hindujatir punargathan) and to build the righteous state (dharmarashtragathan). He sowed the seed of this promise by remaining for forty-four years in the mortal form of the body (sthula dehavigraha). It will take a long time for that seed to germinate and to rise as the Hindu nation (hindujati) which will build a powerful righteous state (dharmarashtra). The building of the nation and of the righteous state will happen through many disasters and much struggle. But it is not possible to hold the mortal body of flesh and bones for such a long time. Therefore, during the Durga Puja festival gathering in Kashi [Benares], the preceptor decided to transfer himself from his own divine mortal body (divya sthula kalevara) to the cosmic body of the community (virat sanghadeha).176

By the 1940s, the Sangha had built extensive sacral-political networks along northern India, was ‘the largest and best organised’ Hindu volunteer group in Bengal,177 and was a leader in mobilising lower castes to the Hindu nationalist cause. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has suggested that this was part of a broader trajectory through which lower-caste Hindus in Bengal – paradigmatically, the Namashudras of eastern Bengal – were integrated into the Hindu nationalist fold. Namashudras had their own rationale. Though they had often allied with Muslims in the past to wage local struggles against upper-caste Hindu dominance as well as to fight electoral battles, they were often also embroiled in disputes about land and community honour with neighbouring Muslims. They felt let down by parties like the Krishak Praja Party and the Muslim League which seemingly de-prioritised them in the quest for consolidating their Muslim base, and did not help them achieve security from outbreaks of sectarian violence. The Great Depression exacerbated the material basis of sectarian tensions. British divide and rule policies also played a critical role.178 Across the late 1930s and 1940s, Namashudras thus often strategically allied

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with high-caste Hindus, though the partnership was fraught with contradictions and frustrations. The Sangha’s royal ceremonies, which integrated lower-caste Hindus (especially, but not exclusively, in eastern Bengal) within an ascetic model of kingship, need to be contextualised within this history, even as they liturgised and exacerbated the violence and militancy which tragically framed Hindu-Muslim sectarian relations in late colonial Bengal.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, offers yet another striking example of a Hindu nationalist model of ascetic government which emerged in interwar India. Christophe Jaffrelot has suggested that under its first two supreme leaders, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940) and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–73), both of them Brahmins from Bombay Presidency, the RSS projected ‘the organization […] itself as a collective guru’. At an iconic level, the bhagva dhvaj or the saffron flag of Shivaji was given the guru status as well. There seems to have developed here, in a manner comparable to the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, an intersection between the ideal of the ascetic guru and that of the ruler-sovereign. Jaffrelot suggests that the RSS modelled itself as a rajguru: this has the dual connotation of being a preceptor to rulers (in postcolonial India, to politicians: of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later of the Bharatiya Janata Party) as well as being a preceptor with a royal nature itself (that is, with covert political ambitions). To consolidate this status, the RSS has emphasised quasi-military discipline, a strict ascetic code, a hierarchical leadership and ‘a complex ritual structure’. While the RSS never attained a hegemonic status in Bengal (though Hedgewar had once been a part of the Calcutta Anushilan Samiti and Golwalkar of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement), it is today the most visible and controversial face of political asceticism in India and a key lynchpin of militant Hindu nationalism.179

A more inclusive and pacifist strand of this interwar messianic ethos can be seen in Rabindranath Tagore. Across the 1930s, and until his death in 1941, Rabindranath celebrated Jesus, the Buddha and various precolonial Indian saints as saviour figures who embodied the capability of human beings to become divine through ethicalised practices of love, and who simultaneously helped society to rise above ethnic, sectarian, or caste divisions. He drew on Indic and Christian ideals to imagine the identity of human beings with divinity.180 At a political plane, he thought that Gandhi approximated such an ideal of emancipatory love: ‘Gandhi Maharaj’ represented, for him, the living antithesis of colonial state violence as well as of the chauvinist excesses of Western-type

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nationalism.181 (In general, Gandhi’s sacral-messianic valence received a new fillip among Indians during the wave of anti-colonial militancy that broke out in the early 1940s.182) In reaction to the Second World War as well as to sectarian violence within India, Rabindranath also expressed intensified longing for a humanity (manushyatva; also mahamanava, great human being) which would function as a collectivised messiah.183 Quasi-messianic articulations are also visible in the 1940s and 1950s in Bengali Communist poetry. Communistinspired poets like Sukanta Bhattacharya and Bishnu Dey created messianic portraits of Lenin, as well as of the revolutionary everyman. They were inspired by the powerful streams of left-radical insurgency that emerged in India in this period, including the Tebhaga movement in Bengal and the Telangana rebellion in princely Hyderabad.184 Rajarshi Dasgupta has rightly emphasised the apocalyptic note in some of these writings, as well as their significance for Communist political production.185

The years leading up to India’s independence, as well as the early postcolonial years, however saw the emergence of a sort of ‘counter-messianic’ literary genre as well, which articulated a kind of anxiety, and sometimes exhaustion, regarding messianic hope. To many intellectuals, especially those with left-democratic sympathies, India’s independence seemed merely to signal a transfer of power to corrupt ruling classes, rather than a fulfilment of the immense messianic dreams that had been unleashed across the previous decades. Bishnu Dey’s poem, ‘Janmashtami 1354’ (1947) offers a graphic articulation of this despair, as it turned the Gandhian hope of Ramarajya upside down, and instead presented the longed-for utopia as a hollow kingdom. Almost a dark twin of Rabindranath’s 1897 poem ‘Pratinidhi’ (see Chapter 3), the exile of the god-king Rama opened up here a space not for true political representation in a democratic polity, but only for a perverse distortion of that: ‘I have seen elections, and many foreign and national (svadeshi) fetters. Rama is not present in my kingdom of Rama. Many chiefs and bosses, using many tricks, are playing at ruling and exploiting the kingdom of Rama (Ramarajatva) of my immovable dreams.’186 Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali novel Dhnorai Charita Manasa (1949–51) – the very name playing on a famous sixteenth-century Hindi verse epic on Rama – acknowledged the revolutionary energies which Gandhian messianism and the hope of Ramarajya had once unleashed, and the excitement this had generated among the lower-caste peasantry. But it also confessed the brutal realities of social exploitation, hierarchy and violence

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which eventually degraded and circumscribed this dream.187 English novels like Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) offered comparable narratives that focused on the connections as well as fissures between messianic hope and everyday reality, between myth and practical politics, which the process of decolonisation and transfer of power made poignantly visible.188

In the 1930s and 1940s, a messianic dream of Allah’s kingdom to come also gained tremendous traction in important strands of Indo-Muslim politics. Historians have shown in detail that this was especially the case in eastern Bengal, where pre-existing class tensions – between largely high-caste Hindu zamindar, moneylender and trading classes, and largely (but not exclusively) Muslim peasantry – prepared the ground for a broad-based political struggle, grounded in the idea that a future Indo-Muslim polity would be a utopia for the masses, and especially for the peasants. Muslim elites as well as intermediary groups, including landowners, merchants, service professionals and religious classes (ulama and pirs), harnessed popular aspirations to (eventually) demand a separate territorial state, in the form of Pakistan.189 I would argue that for many Bengali Muslim actors, Allah’s kingship represented the dialectical negation of human (especially Hindu) zamindar rulership. Abul Mansur Ahmed thus recalled that his elders regarded the exactions imposed by zamindars (beyond legal rent) as rajar julum (the king’s oppression); when these were exacted for financing Hindu worship (like Kali Puja), they additionally involved Muslims in the sin of polytheism (shereki gonah, literally implying the sin of associating a partner with God). For Ahmed himself, even good zamindars only embodied a ‘benevolent monarchy’ which needed to be dismantled to establish a just polity.190 When activists like Abul Hashim championed exemplars of Prophetic rule and the early Caliphate, they envisioned an erasure of human exploitation through the inauguration of divinely-ordained monotheistic sovereignty.191 Already from the 1930s such activists occupied the centre of local politics in Muslim Bengal. An irritated (Muslim) notable, A. K. Ghuznavi, commented in 1933: ‘There is no dearth of Maulvis and Maulanas, Mahatmas and Saints nowadays.’ Such figures urged peasants to act against the state and against landowners and moneylenders, to refuse to pay taxes, rents, or debts and even to ‘cut down all trees as they are nature’s property and, as such, belong to all’.Ghuznavi identified here the origins ‘of the spread of communism’.192 Similarly, in 1934, a British official noted the intersection of ‘religion, politics

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and economics’ in the village praja samities which instigated peasants to resist zamindars and moneylenders.193 The Bengal Famine of 1943, through its destructive effects on the peasantry, further fostered such agrarian radicalism.194 Scholars have underlined in fascinating detail how, in part grounded in such material rationales, the Pakistan movement in the 1940s drew on millenarian ideas of divine rulership, in Bengal (as shown, for instance, by Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, Ahmed Kamal and Neilesh Bose) as well as in northern India (Venkat Dhulipala).195 There were obvious ‘subaltern’ parallels to the narrative of Allah’s sovereignty which found a locus in the Objectives Resolution of 1949 (and later made its way into the Preamble to the Constitution of Pakistan).196

In the propaganda literature that circulated in eastern Bengal in the 1940s, supporting the demand for a separate space of Pakistan, the latter was often figured as a kingdom of God (khodar rajya), a land fit for Muslims as God’s own people, as a royal nation (badshah jati). These texts, often produced by local wings of the Muslim League, drew appealing images of equality (samya) and love (prema) which would animate Pakistan. Muslims were projected as an oppressed people who were, nevertheless, empowered by their democratic (ganatantrik) religion. Rather than a marginal presence within India and the wider Islamic world, eastern Bengal’s riverine and coastal topography now offered the very foundation for dreaming the Islamic utopia. Pakistan was thus cast as a God-guided ship of state, as the source of life-giving inundating water (bestowing life and salvation), while Prophet Muhammad was the navigator of the people.197 The monotheistic unity of God sealed the political unity of the Muslim League, as emphasised, for example, by a leaflet issued in 1944 by the Chittagong branch of the League: The All-India Muslim League is only a national organization (jatiya pratishthan) of Indian Muslims. It is not the property (sampatti) of any particular class (shreni) or stratum (star). It is every Muslim’s own property, whose Allah is one, whose Prophet is one, whose Quran is one, whose qibla [direction of prayer] is one, whose kalimah [creed] is one, who have one and undivided and indivisible (ek evam abhinna o avibhajya) azaan [call for prayer], namaaz [prayer], roza [religious fasting], hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca], zakat [alms-giving], tasbih [chanting of the divine name], purity, life, and death [...]. Therefore to be enemies against the League is like waging jihad [holy war] against the entire nation (jati). Therefore no intelligent Muslim brother or sister will act against it.198

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The localisation of utopia went into further spatial details. Chittagong was thus described in the above pamphlet as ‘the ancient foundation place of Islamic education in Muslim Bengal, the pilgrimage place of knowledge and meditation (jnana o dhyanatirtha), and last resting place of celebrated saints (ali-awliya), elders (pir-bozarg), and ascetics (faqir darvesh).’199 This romantic note coexisted in some (but by no means, all) of the propaganda texts with more militant exhortations to sectarian violence, as indeed in analogous Hindu nationalist discourses.200 But there were also critics of such violence, including Nazrul Islam: in public speeches, poetry and songs in the 1940s, he sought to combat against Islamic as well as Hindu sectarian militancy. He creatively deployed Islamic and Advaita-Indic concepts like tauhid, la sharik, al-ahad, abhedajnana and ekatvavada to emphasise the unity of divinity as well as the indivisibility of all creation, and especially of humanity. He reposed faith in the people’s messianic potential, and hoped in particular that the youth would emerge as ascetically-trained (shakta-siddha) imams, in the footsteps of paigambars (prophets) and mujaddids (renewers of the age), manifest Allah’s jalal aspect of majesty and power, save the poor and help the peasants and workers get their rights and freedoms.201

In the long run, such discourses, some more sectarian and others more open and inclusive, dismantled the old kingship of zamindars, replacing it gradually in eastern Bengal (arguably) with notions of the rulership of God, mediated on earth through the (mainly, male Muslim) peasantry. A snapshot from some decades later, in the form of an anthropological study conducted by John Thorp in rural Bangladesh in the 1970s, observes how Muslim peasant proprietors often regarded themselves as maliks (an Arabic-origin word which, in Bengali, can refer to a master or proprietor, but also to a king or lord), inheritors of a lordship first given by God to Adam. As Adam fulfilled his mastery by cultivating the earth, so did peasants aspire to be maliks with adhikara/rights over their land. This situation was of course possible only when the old zamindari kingship had passed away.202 We can juxtapose Thorp’s perspective with the Islamic discourses from colonial Bengal studied by Andrew Sartori. Sartori makes the crucial point that, in a somewhat similar manner as in John Locke’s writings, Bengali Muslim peasants claimed to be collective heirs of Adam, and thus cosharers of the authority and property Adam had once enjoyed. For Sartori, this parallel between Locke and Bengali peasant thinking resulted not from direct intellectual transfer (the peasants had no inkling of Locke), nor even from the

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belief in Adam shared by Christians and Muslims. Rather, this resulted from processes of commercialisation and capitalism which characterised early modern Britain as well as colonial Bengal, and made it plausible for both Locke and Bengali peasants to think of property as being created by labour. For Bengali Muslim peasants, Adam, as the first labouring individual, provided an archetype of the labouring subject’s claim over the property he created through labour, as well as a model for the political power that resulted from this assertion of a property right.203 In this light, we can better understand the Bengali Muslim political literature of the 1940s which I have analysed above, as marking a point of transition, replacing the authority of the zamindars (like that of the patriarchal king in early modern European discourses) with that of a multiplicity of Adam’s (peasant) sons. Or, in politico-theological terms, it marked a triumph of the monotheistic government of a singular God over the multiplicity of (often, in strict Islamic eyes, polytheistic) rajas: this rejection of shirk, as Abul Mansur Ahmed had confessed, had a material as much as a religious grounding. Divine and prophetic authority, imaged as irrigating the earth with, or navigating the people through, the waters of life and salvation, provided a theological template for the peasants as they irrigated and cultivated their own plots of land, asserted their rights over their corner of the earth, made their way across dangerous rivers and seawater, and hoped, in the end, for a dignified life. The image of the divine monarch and that of the peasant leader obviously dialectically shaped each other. Nor did the utility of such discourses end in 1947; their political potential was certainly not encompassed or exhausted by the ambitions of the elites of the Muslim League and of Pakistan, nor indeed by the horrific violence of the Partition. To consider just one example, the peasant leader Maulana Bhasani’s famous image of God (Rabb, ‘Nourisher’), as the one who nourished the world and was its sole ultimate proprietor, not only mirrored a Communist ideology of centralisation, socialisation and egalitarian redistribution of resources, but also helped, in conjunction with powerful secular strands of Bengali linguistic nationalism, in the emergence of eastern Bengal as the sovereign state of Bangladesh in 1971.204

5.4 Conclusion This chapter has argued that messianic visions of rulership played an important role in the emergence of new concepts of authority in colonial India. These

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visions operated through multiple Indic, Islamic and European-origin frames of reference, and stemmed from local grievances and aspirations as well as transregional solidarities. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, diverse visions of utopianism, ranging from pan-Islamic to Communist dreams, got entangled in India with South Asian imaginaries to produce the most powerful and united wave of anti-colonial politics that modern India has ever witnessed. Class and communitarian divisions fragmented this unity in later decades. Though Hindu and Muslim elites sought to harness and reduce the radical potential of popular messianism, they were not completely successful. The emergence of new waves of radical insurgency after 1947, as in the Naxalite-Maoist movements from the late 1960s, can be seen as continuations of earlier political moments as well as being products of the failures of nationalist messianism.205

Messianic visions of rulership, in all their diversity as well as in their shared subtext of utopianism, constitute a vitally important ingredient in the formation of political modernities in South Asia. ‘Modernity’, understood as a teleological political trope and rhetoric of achieving unending social progress, is emphasised very poignantly in these messianic dreams of moral governance, freedom and social justice or even equality. Such visions were not peculiar to India; as South Asia’s translocal entanglements reveal, discourses on messianic rulership offered a globally-oriented trope about achieving progress and modernity through the construction of just governance. In trying to realise something like God’s kingdom on earth, many Indians were in effect trying to construct a more just vision of modernity: to decolonise modernity, to remove it from its colonial and authoritarian moorings of civilizing mission, and to embed it in the quotidian life of the people. In the hands of elite sections of Indian society, the formation of a sovereign nation-state and the violent building of majoritarian political communities offered convenient mythologies to appropriate and deflect these more radical aspirations. The structure of nation-state sovereignty (realised through the independence of India and of Pakistan) was however only one strand of aspiration within a vastly more rich corpus of discussions about sovereign authority which took shape among South Asians in the late-colonial era. A more comprehensive and radical decolonisation and subalternisation of sovereignty, of which messianic hopes stood as a signifier, always remained in the horizon, even when such fantasies were not politically instantiated. Conceptions of messianic-divine sovereignty seldom remained under the total control of nationalist elites. Plebeian populations produced their own

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horizons of messianic justice which were sometimes complicit with various elite nationalist projects, and sometimes in antagonism to them. These models emerged at the interstices of hierarchies (embedded in exploitative apparatuses arranged along class, gender, and community) and horizontal group solidarities. In the course of the struggles of the more disenfranchised segments of the South Asian population, political modernity was crafted through campaigns from below, in response to specific grievances about revenue and rent oppression and the extortions of capital as well as on the basis of more generalised and ethicalised demands for justice. Different forms of political modernity thus emerged in South Asia, and undoubtedly elsewhere in the colonial and semicolonial world, from multiple European and extra-European lineages, through transregional circulations in discourses of justice and progress as well as through localised fights for empowerment. Such utopian struggles dismantled many old and entrenched hierarchies, even as they reinforced other forms of social exclusion. In all its myriad varieties, ‘modernity’ did not emerge as a simple gift of the coloniser to the colonised; it had to be fought for in the name of utopian political visions. Collectivised messianic aspirations had a role to play in this context, in India and probably elsewhere too.

Endnotes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

While Jay Winter has used the term ‘utopian moment’ (Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), my focus on extra-European subaltern and colonial anxieties differs from his approach. On the manner in which these factors were perceived by the colonial state, an excellent primary source is: HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 12–24.

P. C. Bamford, Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements (hereafter Bamford Report), Delhi: Government of India, 1925, 49. Muhammad Ali (1878– 1931) and Shaukat Ali (1873–1939) were militant leaders of Indo-Muslim politics.

CWMG vol. 18, 133, 188, 386–88, 393–95, 403–5, 435, 438–42, 453–55, 465; CWMG vol. 19, 27–28, 33, 37, 49, 63, 68, 114, 123–25, 178, 453, 482, 503, 512–14, 519, 568; CWMG, vol. 20, 9, 113, 267. Bamford Report, 50.

E.g. CWMG vol. 20, 9.

Vajpeyi, in Righteous Republic, has placed swaraj at the heart of her analysis of modern Indian political thought.

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

CWMG vol. 20, 506. CWMG, vol. 17, Delhi: Government of India, 1990, 493–95. CWMG, vol. 15, Delhi: Government of India, 1998, 288–89. CWMG, vol. 18, 115–16, 125–27, 414. CWMG, vol. 17, 408. Ibid., 489. CWMG, vol. 18, 126. Bamford Report, 53. Translation of Speech Delivered by Gandhi at Barisal on 2 September 1921, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 46 (51–56), 1921, ‘Non-Co-operation and the Khilafat Agitation’. 17 CWMG vol. 19, 280; vol. 20, 114–15, 361. 18 CWMG vol. 20, 122. 19 CWMG, vol. 18, 120–23. 20 Sarkar, Modern India, 168–71. 21 HCPP. Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India during the Year 1915–16, 55. Hereafter these statements are abbreviated as MMP, followed by the relevant years. 22 HCPP. MMP 1919, iii. 23 Ibid., 63. 24 HCPP. MMP 1920, 133. 25 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 111; MMP 1920, 133. 26 HCPP. East India (Constitutional Reforms). Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, 112. 27 Bamford Report, 59-60. 28 Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 346. 29 Gyan Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–22’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 1, edited by Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 (1982), 166. 30 David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005, 138– 42. 31 M. Venkatarangaiya (ed.), The Freedom Struggle in Andhra Pradesh, vol. 3, Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1965, 390. 32 Hashmi, Pakistan, 53. 33 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 395 (1–3), 1924, ‘History of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements in Bengal’, 7. 34 Letter from Lawrence Dundas, Earl of Ronaldshay (later Marquess of Zetland), to Edwin Montagu, 18 May 1921, in Montagu Collection.

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35 Ronaldshay to Montagu, 9 February 1922, in Montagu Collection. 36 Hitesranjan Sanyal, Svarajer Pathe, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1994, 10. 37 RNPB 1921: Hindusthan, 9 July; Samay, 16 July.

38 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 39 (129–137), 1921, ‘The Present Political Situation in Bengal and the Policy to be Adopted towards the Non-Cooperation Movement’. 39 HCPP. MMP 1919, 69–70; MMP 1920, 142. 40 Bamford Report, 59.

41 Ibid., 60–62; RNPB: Sanjivani, 7 July 1921. 42 HCPP. MMP 1921, 70.

43 R. P. Dutt, India To-day, Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1979 (1940), 341–42; Sarkar, Modern India, 180, 225. 44 E.g. Amin, ‘Gandhi’; Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922– 1992, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Pandey, ‘Peasant’. 45 Shruti Kapila, ‘Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth’, Public Culture 23(2) 2011: 448.

46 It is impossible to summarise the vast literature. I have found the following especially inspiring: Mukherjee, India in Shadows; Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012; Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2012; and Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. There are important reflections on Gandhi, as well as the problem of violence in general, in Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji (eds.), Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 47 HCPP. MMP 1921, 61. 48

The role of British foreign policy in conceptualising the Caliphate is discussed in Sean Oliver-Dee, The Caliphate Question: The British Government and Islamic Governance, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009.

49 Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 106 (51–61), 1920, ‘Khalifat Agitation. Distribution of Pamphlets Relating to the Khalifat Question and Other Matters’. Toynbee (1889–1975) was a British historian; at the time of the Khilafat agitation, he was Professor at London University, and part of the Middle-Eastern Section of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. 50 Bamford Report, 120. Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958) was a Muslim scholar and an Indian nationalist politician; he later became the Minister of Education in postcolonial India. 51 Ibid., 146.

52 Letter from J. H. Lindsay, to J. T. Rankin, Commissioner, Dacca Division, 20 March 1920, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 106 (34–50), 1920, ‘Muhammadan Agitation in Connection with the Allies’ Settlement with Turkey, Report on the “Hartal” of the 19th March, 1920’.

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53 Bamford Report, 174. 54 R. V. Thadani (compiled), The Historic State Trial of the Ali Brothers and Five Others, Karachi: R. V. Thadani, 1921. 55 Foreword, in ibid. 56 Ibid., 65–87, 270–75, 308–9, 312–16. 57 Ibid., 69–70. 58 Ibid., Appendix D, 180–81. 59 Ibid., 71. 60 Ibid., 72. 61 Ibid., 266. 62 Ibid., 268. 63 Ibid., Appendix D, 158–59, 170. 64 Ibid., 254, 283–85. 65 Ibid., 258, 320–21. 66 Ibid., 324. 67 Ibid., 106. 68 Ibid., 145–46. 69 Bamford Report, 54. 70 Ibid., 173. 71 Extract from the Diary of D. I. O., 1.5.1921, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 46 (3–8), 1921, ‘The NonCooperation Movement and the Khilafat Agitation’. 72 Bamford Report, 187. 73 CWMG vol. 19, 298. 74 Bamford Report, 168-69. Maulana Abdul Bari (1878–1926) was a Muslim scholar and politician of colonial India. 75 Ibid., 179. 76 Letter from Lawrence Dundas, Earl of Ronaldshay (later Marquess of Zetland), to Frederic Thesiger, Viscount Chelmsford, 22 May 1919, in Chelmsford Collection. 77 Bamford Report, 242. 78 A. Abel, ‘Un Hadit sur la prise de Rome dans la tradition eschatologique de l’Islam’, in Arabica, T. 5, Fasc. 1, 1958, 1–14; Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yerasimos (eds.), Les Traditions Apocalyptiques au Tournant de la chute de Constantinople, Istanbul and Paris: Institut Français d’études Anatoliennes; L’Harmattan, 1999; Kaya Sahin, ‘Constantinople and the End Time: The Ottoman Conquest as a Portent of the Last Hour’, Journal of Early Modern History 14(4) 2010: 317–54. 79 Extract from Weekly Report from the Intelligence Branch, 3 March 1920, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential List, File No. 106 (34–50), 1920, ‘Muhammadan Agitation in Connection with the Allies’ Settlement with Turkey, Report on the “Hartal” of the 19th March, 1920’; Bamford Report, 240– 42.

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80 Letter from Lord Chelmsford to the Earl of Ronaldshay, 31 May 1919, Letter from Charles Cleveland, Director, Central Intelligence, to Hignell, 30 May 1919, and Letter from Cleveland to Hignell, 31 May 1919, in Chelmsford Collection; C. M. Naim, ‘‘Prophecies’ in South Asian Muslim Political Discourse: The Poems of Shah Ni’matullahWali’, Economic and Political Weekly 46(28) 2011: 49–58; M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 19181924, Leiden: Brill, 1999, 112. 81 Bamford Report, 161. 82 Jalal, Self, 208. 83 Stephen Frederic Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498–1922, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 (especially 209); K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. 84 Bamford Report, 175. 85 HCPP. MMP 1921, 18-19. 86 Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, Delhi: Routledge, 2010. 87 Ahmad, Amar Jivana, 47–83; Sarkar, Modern India, 247–51. 88 Qureshi, Pan-Islam, 174–232. 89 Abdul Qadir Khan, ‘A Pupil of the Soviet II. Life at the University, Lenin and Enver’, in The Times, 26 February 1930, 15. 90 Abdul Qadir Khan, ‘A Pupil of the Soviet I. The Road to Moscow, A Personal Record’, in The Times, 25 February 1930, 15. 91 Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913– 1929, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011. 92 Subodh Roy (ed.), Communism in India: Unpublished Documents, 1919-1924, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1997, 13. 93 Ladlimohon Ray Chaudhury (ed.), The Seed-Time of Communist Movement in India, 1919-1926, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 2000, 136, 138. 94 Ibid.,169. 95 Sarkar, Modern India, 249. 96 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal records: Sl. No. 112/22, File No. 288/22; Sl. No. 108/1924, File No. 264/24 (34); Sl. No. 117/1924, File No. 291/1924; Sl. No. 127/1926, File No. 486/1926. 97 Nazrul Islam, ‘Korbani’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 1, 38–40. 98 Nazrul Islam, ‘Vidrohi’ and ‘Agamani’ in ibid.,7–16. 99 Nazrul Islam, ‘Yugavani’, in ibid.,416–20, 430, 437–40, 529–30. 100 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 112/22, File No. 288/22. 101 Nazrul Islam, ‘Bisher Bnashi’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 1, 89–140. 102 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 117/1924, File No. 291/1924.

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103 Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 1, 499.

104 Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 7, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2006, 671. 105 Arunkumar Basu, Nazrul-Jivani, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2000, 102–19. 106 Nazrul Islam, ‘Rajbandir Jabanbandi’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 1, 461–64. 107 Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 7, 669–74.

108 M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq (ed. and tr.), Prince Muhammad Dara Shikuh, Majma-ulBahrain or The Mingling of the Two Oceans, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1929. 109 Nazrul Islam, ‘Zulfiqar’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, 308.

110 Letter from Nazrul Islam to Ibrahim Khan, 1927, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 2, 507.

111 Nazrul Islam, ‘Samyavadi’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 2, 73–88. 112 Ibid.,82.

113 Nazrul Islam, ‘Durdiner Yatri’, in ibid.,417–19.

114 Nazrul Islam, ‘Rudramangala’, in ibid.,429–47, 563–69.

115 Nazrul Islam, ‘Fani Manasa’, in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 3, 2–5, 15, 31–32, 548–50. 116 Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2013, 156–57. 117 Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, London: C. Hurst and Co., 2005, 48.

118 Pace Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 119 HCPP. MMP 1929–30, 17–18, 21–23.

120 Apart from the colonial reports used here, see also Sarkar, Modern India, 261, 269–74. 121 HCPP. MMP 1930–31, 163, 296, 376. 122 HCPP. MMP 1931–32, 6.

123 HCPP. MMP 1932–33, 116-18. 124 HCPP. MMP 1933–34, 121.

125 For a global history of the Great Depression, see Dietmar Rothermund, The Global Impact of the Great Depression 1929–1939, London: Routledge, 1996. 126 HCPP. MMP 1932–33, 52.

127 S. Irfan Habib, ‘Shaheed Bhagat Singh and his Revolutionary Inheritance’, Indian Historical Review 34(2) 2007: 79–94; Ishwar Dayal Gaur, Martyr as Bridegroom: A Folk Representation of Bhagat Singh, London: Anthem Press, 2008. Bhagat Singh (1907–31) was an anti-British militant rebel from Punjab.

128 Gautam Chattopadhyay, Communism and Bengal’s Freedom Movement, vol. 1, Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970; David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942, Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1970; Sudhansu Dasgupta, Pramad Dasguptar Sange Sei Dinaguli, Calcutta: Nishan Prakashani, 2009.

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‘God’s Kingdom has Come’ 393

129 Letter from Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, 11 January 1933, to Rai N. Mazumdar Bahadur, Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch Bengal, Calcutta, in Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 69/1925, File No. 285/25.

130 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 30/1928, File No. 149/1928; Sl. No. 141/1928, File No. 149/1928; Sl No. 182/1929, File No. 322/1929; Sl. No. 14/1930, File No. 20/1930; Sl. No. 47/1930, File No. 61/1930; RNPB 1928-1933. 131 RNPB: E. B. Railway Labour Review, June 1930.

132 RNPB: B. N. R. Employees’ Journal, January and February 1932. 133 RNPB: E. B. Railway Labour Review, October 1932.

134 RNPB: Scottish Church College Magazine, December 1930. 135 RNPB: Sramik, 11 April 1930.

136 See, for example: Kazi Nazrul Islam, ‘Pralayashikha’ (1930), in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 4, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2003, 33–58, 607-10. 137 As examples of this new trend, see: Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department of Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 51/1928, File No. 141/1928, ‘Enquiries regarding Leaflets’.

138 CWMG vol. 43, Delhi: Government of India, 1971, 60, 112–16, 131–32, 144–45, 162, 176, 182; Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Traditional Society and Political Mobilization: The Experience of Bardoli Satyagraha (1920–1928)’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 8(1) 1974: 89–107; David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917– 1934, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981, 194–95, 242–45; Sean Scalmer, Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 139 Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, 98–99.

140 Ibid., 91-92.

141 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Jitu Santal’s Movement in Malda, 1924–1932: A Study in Tribal Protest’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 4, edited by Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 157.

142 Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 13/1910, File No. 353/1910, ‘Note on Political Sanyasis’; and Sl. No. 56/1913, File No. 1340/1913.

143 Uma Das Gupta, ‘Tagore’s Ideas of Social Action and the Sriniketan Experiment of Rural Reconstruction, 1922-41’, University of Toronto Quarterly 77(4) 2008: 992– 1004; Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 69/1925, File No. 285/25. 144 Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 145 Mark Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashrams, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1993; Ajay Skaria, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4) 2002: 955–86.

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146 Swami Gambhirananda, History of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1957, 346–49; Swami Prabhananda, The Early History of the Ramakrishna Movement, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 2005, 424–30; Swami Tattwajnanananda, A Symphony in Architecture: Ramakrishna Temple, Belurmath, Howrah: Ramakrishna Mission Shilpamandira, n.d.

147 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Role of the Gosains in the Economy of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Upper India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 1(4) 1964: 175–82; D. H. A. Kolff, ‘Sannyasi Trader-Soldiers’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 8(2) 1971: 213–18; David N. Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 98(1) 1978: 61–75; Bayly, Rulers; Richard Burghart, ‘Wandering Ascetics of the Ramanandi Sect’, History of Religions 22(4) 1983: 361–80; Kolff, Naukar; Atis K. Dasgupta, The Fakir and Sannyasi Uprisings, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1992; William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 148 Malavika Kasturi, ‘‘‘Asceticising” Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 43(5) 2009: 1039–83.

149 Pinch, Peasants; Hauser, ‘Peasant Soldiering’; Ikegame, Princely India; Aya Ikegame, ‘The Governing Guru: Hindu Mathas in Liberalising India’, in The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame, London: Routledge, 2012, 46–63. 150 On Bengal, Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics, 142–99. 151 HCPP. MMP 1928-29, 2; MMP 1929–30, 9.

152 For example, see: HCPP. MMP 1933–34, 19–20. 153 HCPP. MMP 1931–32, 5.

154 http://www.bharatsevashramsangha.net/, accessed 17 March 2014.

155 For the colonial state’s perspective on the Sangha, see: Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 131/1926, File No. 18/1926, ‘Miscellaneous Inquiries Regarding Sadhus, Sanyasis and Fakirs’; Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 694/1947, File No. 75/1947, ‘“Rakshi Dal”, an organisation of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha of 211, Rash Bihari Avenue, Calcutta’. For the Sangha’s own view, see: Swami Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2008 (1942); Swami Nirmalananda, Shriguru Sange Shriguru Prasange, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2002 (2nd edition); Swami Nirmalananda (ed.), Shri Shri Pranavananda – Shatarupe, Shatamukhe, vols. 1–3, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2002–09 (3rd and 4th editions); Swami Advaitananda, Shri Shri Pranavananda-Lilasmrti, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2010 (4th edition); Swami Atmananda (ed.), Shri Shri Yugacharya Sanga o Upadeshamrta, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2010 (8th edition); Swami Atmananda (ed.), Manishider Drshtite Acharya Svami Pranavananda, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 1996 (4th edition); Nishakar Chaudhuri, Shri Shri Pranavananda Sanga, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 2006 (1954); Swami Nirmalananda (ed.), Yugacharya Svami Pranavananda - Avirbhava Shatabdir-Arghya, Calcutta: Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 1996; Ninian Smart and Swami Purnananda, Prophet of a New Hindu Age: The Life and Times of Acharya Pranavananda, London:

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‘God’s Kingdom has Come’ 395 George Allen and Unwin, 1985. Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–53) was a founder of modern Hindu nationalist politics. He became a Union Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet, but later left the ministry due to political disagreements.

156 Syama Prasad Mookerjee, ‘Jyotirmaya Bharater Divya Drashta - Acharya Svami Pranavanandaji Maharaj’ (1953), in Manishider, edited by Atmananda, 11–12.

157 Tathagata Roy, The Life and Times of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee: A Complete Biography, Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan, 2012, 74; also, 16, 349. 158 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 233–36; Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 296-316, 352-54. 159 Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 123–24, 203–11. 160 Ibid., 212–13.

161 Ibid., 334–35; Advaitananda, Shri Shri Pranavananda-Lilasmrti, 304–5. 162 Nirmalananda, Shriguru, 310.

163 Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 336–37. (On Virat Purusha, see Introduction and Chapter 3). 164 Ibid., 337–41; Nirmalananda, Shriguru, 311–12; Advaitananda, Shri Shri Pranavananda-Lilasmrti, 320.

165 James Wise, Notes on the Races, Castes, and Trades of Eastern Bengal, London: Harrison and Sons, 1883, 260–61. 166 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997. 167 Advaitananda, Shri Shri Pranavananda-Lilasmrti, 366.

168 Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 240–43. 169 Ibid., 241. 170 Ibid., 243.

171 Ibid., 265–68, 275. 172 Ibid., 298.

173 Ibid., 315–16.

174 Ibid., 268–69, 310–16; Smart, Prophet, 113–19.

175 Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 353–54. On the Partition, see Chatterji, Bengal Divided. 176 Vedananda, Shri Shri Yugacharya-Jivana-Charita, 354–55. 177 Chatterji, Bengal Divided, 233. 178 Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest.

179 Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Political Guru: The Guru as Eminence Grise’, in Guru, edited by Copeman and Ikegame, 80–96 (quotes from 89). For RSS activities in Bengal in the 1940s, see Chatterji, Bengal Divided, 236–37.

180 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Child’ (1931), ‘Shishutirtha’ (1931), ‘Manavaputra’ (1932), ‘Tirthayatri’ (1933), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 3, 66–73, 96–97, 1303–11; ‘Khristotsava’ (1923), ‘Manavasambandher Devata’ (1926), ‘Barodin’ (1932), and

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The Mortal God ‘Khrista’ (1936), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 264–70; ‘Manusher Dharma’ (1933), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 14, 1007–49. Also ‘Abhyudaya’ (1932), ‘Pratiksha’ (1936), and ‘Navajataka’ (1938), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 3, 308–9, 575, 685; and the song (1939) in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 4, 740.

181 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Mahatmajir Punyavrata’ (1932) and ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ (1936), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 11, 278–80, 271–74; ‘Gandhi Maharaj’ (1940), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 3, 1300. 182 Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1988, 19, 83, 109–21, 124–38, 159, 197, 223. 183 Letter of Rabindranath Tagore to Amiya Chakravarti, 20 June 1940, in Chithipatra, vol. 11, 334–36; Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sabhyatar Samkata’ (1941), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 13, 733–38.

184 Sukanta Bhattacharya, Sukanta Rachanasamagra, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2011; Bishnu Dey, Kavitasamagra, vol. 1, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2007; Kavitasamagra, vol. 2, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1990. Sukanta Bhattacharya (1926–47) and Bishnu Dey (1909–82) were Bengali poets.

185 Rajarshi Dasgupta, ‘Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal’, Studies in History 21(1) 2005: 79–98. 186 Bishnu Dey, ‘Janmashtami 1354’ (1947), in Kavitasamagra, vol. 2, 100.

187 Satinath Bhaduri, Dhnorai Charita Manasa, Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1982. Satinath Bhaduri (1906–65) was a Bengali writer.

188 Satish C. Aikant, ‘Colonial Ambivalence in R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42(2) 2007: 89–100; Ben Conisbee Baer, ‘Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modernism/Modernity 16(3) 2009: 575–95; Das, Indian Literature, 1911–1956, 64–70, 74–75. Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), Raja Rao (1908–2006), and R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) were celebrated Indian writers of English literary works. 189 Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal,1920–1947, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992; Ahmed Kamal, “A Land of Eternal Eid’ – Independence, People, and Politics in East Bengal’, The Dhaka University Studies 46(1) 1989: 57–81; Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 190 Ahmed, Amar Dekha, 13, 82–83.

191 Abul Hashim, Amar Jivana o Vibhagapurva Bangladesher Rajaniti, Chittagong: Bangladesh Cooperative Book Society, 1998 (1978), 53–54, 88.

192 Note of A. K. Ghuznavi, 22 February 1933, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 112 (1–6), 1933. 193 Letter from T. M. Dow, District Officer in Mymensingh, to the Commissioner of the Dacca Division, 7 October 1934, in Political Department, Political Branch, Government of Bengal, Confidential File No. 161 (29–67)/1934. 194 Hashim, Amar Jivana, 63–64.

195 Hashmi, Pakistan; Kamal, ‘Land’; Bose, Recasting; Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New

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‘God’s Kingdom has Come’ 397 Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

196 Wael B. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law, Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 148; Ali Usman Qasmi, ‘God’s Kingdom on Earth? Politics of Islam in Pakistan, 1947–1969’, Modern Asian Studies 44(6) 2010: 1197–1253. 197 This description is based on leaflets in Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 215/44, File No. 250B44 (M.L.), ‘Leaflets Brought to the Notice of the IB (Muslim League)’.

198 Chittagong District Muslim League Bulletin No. 1, 11 February 1944, Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 215/44, File No. 250B44 (M.L.), ‘Leaflets Brought to the Notice of the IB (Muslim League)’. 199 Ibid.

200 See for example the leaflets in Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, Police, Bengal, Sl. No. 270/46, File No. 717D/46.

201 Kazi Nazrul Islam, ‘Allahr Pathe Atmasamarpana’ (1940), in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 4, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2003, 568–74; ‘Natun Chand’ (1945, 1951), in Nazrul Rachanasamagra, vol. 5, 36–38, 40–45; ‘Agranthita Kavita’ (1940) and ‘Agranthita Gan’ (1941) in Kazi Nazrul Islam Rachanasamagra, vol. 6, Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2005, 33–35, 305. 202 John Putnam Thorp Jr., ‘Masters of Earth: Conceptions of “Power” among Muslims of Rural Bangladesh’, University of Chicago PhD Dissertation, 1978. A celebrated malik in Bengali literature is Hosen Mia in Manik Bandyopadhyay, Padmanadir Majhi, Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1997 (1936). 203 Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, especially 9–10, 112, 146–48.

204 On Bhasani, see Abid S. Bahar, ‘The Religious and Philosophical Basis of Bhasani’s Political Leadership’, Concordia University PhD Dissertation, 2003; Peter Custers, ‘Maulana Bhashani and the Transition to Secular Politics in East Bengal’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 47(2) 2010: 231–59. Maulana Bhasani (1880– 1976) was a Bengali Muslim politician.

205 Based on my study of Naxalite journals and of Naxalite propaganda literature (especially pamphlets) of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as archived by the Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, West Bengal Police, I would argue that Naxalite discourses on new man (natun manush) and on the immediacy of liberation have remarkable similarities with pre-1947 anti-colonial messianic and utopian discourses.

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts At the heart of this book is an interstitial, and in many ways, still enigmatic, figure: that of the sovereign. (Of course, I have studied sovereign figures in the plural, but let me for a moment linger on the word in the singular to achieve a level of generality and abstraction.) By using this term, I have sought to straddle, as well as slip in between, two conceptual spaces: that of kingship or rulership and that of sovereignty. Neither kingship nor sovereignty entirely captures the chameleon facets of the sovereign figure, at least as I have deployed it in this volume. The sovereign, as a heuristic frame of analysis, is related to categories of divine, human and messianic kingship. Certainly, many of the sovereign figures I have studied were mythical and historical kingly (and queenly) personalities, commemoratively deployed in remarkable ways across the late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century in India. Yet, this book has not been a study of kingship per se; there is more to its argument than a focus on, for instance, the British monarchy or the Indian princely states. The greater weight of the book has, in fact, been borne by imagined and imaginary rulers, rulers who were almost drawn out of the mist, by a conjuror’s sleight of hand, by anti-colonial nationalists or peasant actors to articulate their political demands. This book is not simply a history of modern kingship in India.

In a way, the book has been about an inexplicable excess. The surplus of divine and human regal figures in British and Indian imagination requires an explanation, especially because much of these political invocations were about far more than royal politics. To put this bluntly, many Indian nationalists or peasant politicians cared very little about trying to build any ‘real’ national monarchy. Clearly, kingship alone constitutes no adequate explanatory frame here. There was, for sure, an overarching imperial monarchy and many subordinate princely rulerships in colonial India. But the peculiarly passionate force with which many British and Indian actors (I have, admittedly, put far more emphasis on the latter than on the former) thought of rulership requires a more complex horizon of explanation. I have suggested that the category of sovereignty offers this missing interpretative link. This may seem an odd conjecture to make at first glance. Only some of the discourses I have referred to enunciated the notion of state

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 399

sovereignty in the abstract. Many of the discourses spoke about the ‘sovereign’ rather than about ‘sovereignty’. A large spectrum of the intellectual production, especially in Bengali, did not use the sovereign/sovereignty terminological dyad at all, but worked through various South Asian idioms of rulership. However, I have shown that these multifarious discourses did in fact intend at, and often succeeded remarkably in, transforming concepts and practices of political sovereignty in South Asia. The different actors I have studied were all, in their several ways, conceptual militants, people who battled with the help of concepts and battled over structures of state sovereignty: over distribution of state power, material resources and political recognition. To re-invoke Bodin’s definition of sovereignty, these were ultimately campaigns over the very locus of supreme power and authority to command. Was it to be the empire, the nation, some sort of transnational political community, or even the multiple political communities that inhabited the space of colonial India and resisted being hijacked by any singular definition of imperial subjecthood or national identity? Could one even speak of human sovereignty without grappling with the concept of divine sovereignty? In debating, in effect, over who would wield Bodin’s authorité de commander, over which political institution would become the paradigmatic Hobbesian ‘mortal god’, the political actors I have studied diverged from each other. Even actors who could theoretically inhabit the same conceptual space (for example, that of imperial sovereignty) might radically differ in shaping the exact implications of the sovereign/sovereignty dyad: one only has to contrast Viceroy Lord Lytton’s worldview about the British monarchic sovereign with that of a Rajavamshi peasant politician, for example. Yet, what is fascinating about colonial India is that such multiple discourses (and practices) did not exist in isolation, but intertwined, melded and wrestled with each other, often through the sedate prose of a literary text or the ceremoniousness of ritual, often in the heat of electoral battles and violent insurrections. The many conflicts over ruler-figures which I have described in this text were, emphatically, contestations over capturing political power, and thus, battles over sovereignty. In speaking about variant sovereigns, the actors I study were attempting to erect different structures of political sovereignty, through and against the lineaments of state power. However much sovereign figures may dazzle our eyes, even blind us with their affected luminosity, we need to see beyond them and see also into the darknesses they conceal, to expose the arrangements of sovereignty they liturgise.

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My intention, very clearly, is not to provide a singular definition of the ‘sovereign’ or of ‘sovereignty’. Rather, I aim at capturing the plurality of intellectual positions that different actors took up, with significant historical ramifications. The term ‘sovereign’, in bridging the study of rulerships (of varying degrees of empirical and imaginative reality) with the study of changing structures of political sovereignty, is flexible, complex and capacious enough to harbour the densely woven, visible and yet elusive, arguments that I am interested in laying bare and historicising: elusive because they cannot be anchored to kingship alone, nor exclusively to the seemingly familiar prose of state sovereignty. The sovereigns, as never-quite-definable, never-quite-there figures, can still be known by the traces they invariably leave on their authors and spectators: they renew, they transform, they violate.

The elements of definitional agonism and contradictoriness which have shaped the career of the sovereign/sovereignty pair in colonial India are of course not specific to the subcontinent. It is transparent that there ‘is no single definition of sovereignty because the meaning of the term depends on the theoretical context within which it is used’.1 Nevertheless, it is interesting to probe what a recent volume labels as ‘after sovereignty’: to search for multiple genealogical meanings of sovereignty, even while critiquing the pursuit of any authoritarian or hegemonic frame of sovereignty as such.2 An analogous exercise to grab and renounce the term activates, in many ways, this book, which seeks to rigorously historicise definitions of the sovereign/sovereignty pair, to destabilise any monopolising (for example, imperial, or nationalist) semantic frames, and to make democratically available and plausible plural possibilities, scales and spaces of being sovereign. The book generally abdicates from any ‘transcendental’ definitions and focuses on the immanent politics and methodology of conceptual possibility. For analytical ease, I have carried out my research on these sovereign figures at five levels. First, I have investigated the manner in which many British administrators, politicians and intellectuals imagined a monistic order of state sovereignty in India by invoking the British imperial monarch and Christian monotheistic theology, while simultaneously drawing upon diverse European (especially ancient Roman) and Asian (especially Mughal) imperial projects. Our study includes the internal debates within British rhetoric (pitting, for example, Conservatives against Liberals), and the self-conscious diminution of this rhetoric as the inevitability of constitutional reforms and devolution of

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powers to Indians became clear to many British statesmen. I have highlighted the material and ideological reasons which underlay Indian responses to, and subversions of, colonial monarchic-monotheistic projects.

Second, I have examined the manner in which in princely India, British political, military, economic and cultural interventions often substantially monarchised textures of governance, tilting the balance of authority in favour of princely rulers and reducing polycentric elements of local power distribution prevalent earlier. I have suggested that Indian princely elites and intellectuals harnessed such transformations to strengthen regional structures of monarchic sovereignty, producing thereby, new concepts of reformist and patriotic rulership which had a broad translocal impact, including on political-discursive controversies and intellectual formations in non-princely British India.

Third, I have suggested that South Asian (Hindu and Muslim) nationalists evolved new discourses and liturgies that celebrated diverse historical and mythical rulers as embodiments of national sovereignty. Their aim was to heroise nationalist militants and politicians as well as draw blueprints for the leadership of the future nation-state. In these perspectives, constitutionalist ideals remained in tension with admiration for more command-oriented forms of singular executive authority. However, no consensus ever evolved among middle-class nationalists about the possibility of an actual national king: the failed coronation of Surendranath Banerjea in 1906 is a testament to these ambiguities, as is a candid auto-critique by Jawaharlal Nehru who identified himself as a reluctant would-be Caesar. The monistic ruler remained as a symbol of the nation-state, an iconic – arguably, Leviathanic – embodiment of the narrative social contract which created and justified the nation, even if no national monarchy emerged in modern India.

Fourth, I have focused on discourses among lower caste and ‘tribal’ communities through which martial peasant groups asserted regal and divine identity, often by claiming to be Kshatriya descendants or kinsmen of rulers. These peasant-Kshatriyas offered collectivist models of protective and nourishing sovereignty which helped challenge upper caste hegemony and democratise Indian politics. I have argued that these standpoints and related political programmes were based on hybridisation between South Asian ideas of shared rulership and community power (which were, at least in part, of precolonial provenance) on the one hand, and Western-modern constitutionalist, democratic and socialist concepts and associational practices on the other.

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Fifth, I have examined the construction of messianic sovereignty at the crossroads of Indic avatara and ascetic-ruler norms (including the icon of ‘Gandhi Maharaj’), Islamic ideas of the Mahdi and of Allah’s and Prophetic sovereignty as well as Christian notions, mingled with various modern-Western discourses on ‘progressive’ and ‘revolutionary’ governance. Popular, including peasant, expectations about messianic authority were appropriated as well as constricted by elite Hindu and Muslim nationalism, even as the utopian expectations unleashed massive political movements that paved the way for the demise of the British Empire in the subcontinent.

At all levels, the book contextualises developments in Bengal (and associated princely states) within wider South Asian as well as global transformations. British administrators and politicians referred to developments within the broader British Empire, and in other (e.g., Habsburg, German and Russian) empires, to justify their monarchic policies. Ancient Roman imperial models were also crucial. South Asian nationalists referred not only to British discourses, but also to contemporaneous politics in Germany, Italy and Japan to justify a strong national rulership. The Ottoman Empire, South-East Asia (Bali, Java and Siam), and the emerging nation-states of the Islamic world (such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan) offered exemplars and inspiration for monarchicallyinflected frameworks of patriotism. Many Indians invoked Christian theologies, questions of Church–State relationship and the Papacy’s role to articulate their viewpoints. New rituals of visualising the nation emerged through such transregional conversations. Some Indians, including Gandhi, compared the Indian struggle against the British Empire to Jesus’s supposed revolt against Rome, thereby constructing a powerful analogy of rivalry between Caesar and messiah, and comprehensively subverting colonial references to antiquity. The global orientation of horizons was also a subaltern phenomenon, as made strikingly apparent by popular Muslim beliefs about the eschatological significance of Constantinople. Similarly, Rajavamshi politics, intellection and ceremonial – including the recreation of the Great War in the Bengal countryside – demonstrate the global orientation of peasant political thought in early-twentieth century India. Ultimately, hybridity was the hallmark of elite as well as peasant discourses. Theological and historical visions of conciliarism and polyarchy served as cornerstones for edifices of political constitutionalism. The blueprints, thus created, were deployed to enunciate new narratives of social progress and ‘modernity’.

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Movements of textual citations offer a route towards identifying the translocal orientation of Indian discourses. Alfred Lyall’s invocation of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and especially the striking imagery of the ‘mortal god’, to narrate the British Indian state’s sovereignty, has offered a guiding frame and leitmotif for this book. The Hobbesian pretensions of the colonial state, as the privileged protector of the people and the guardian of order against anarchy, have of course been commented upon by earlier scholars as well.3 What have hardly received attention are the Indian transformations of this Hobbesian trope; this book has contributed in this regard. At one level, some Indians tried to nationalise and indigenise Hobbes. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, taking a cue from Carlo Formichi, located Hobbesian ideas in precolonial Indian texts, thereby identifying ‘absolutist’ genealogies of Hindu national statecraft. Ilyas Ahmad conceptualised Allah through the prism of Hobbes, using the ‘mortal god’ metaphor to proclaim the superiority of the immortal god, while affirming that the ‘theocratic democracy’ allegedly present in early Islam could offer a blueprint to a future Islamic state. The earliest European reading of Indian politics through a social contract gaze that I have come across occurs in the eighteenth century writing of the Francophone Creole ‘Nota Manus’ (who was incidentally also aware of Hobbes). Indian intellectuals seemingly started relating their politics to social contract theories (in Bengali, samajika chuktivada) since the late-nineteenth century: two pioneers in Bengal were Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Bhudev Mukhopadhyay. In Bombay, Tilak found in the politics of the Maratha king Shivaji an unconscious instantiation of Hobbesian notions of social contract. Muhammad Ali subtly invoked Hobbes in a dramatic trial to question the legitimacy of the British state as a Hobbesian ruler. For intellectuals writing in the context of debates about devolution of state powers to Indians, and especially while the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were debated and ultimately implemented through the Government of India Act of 1919, discussing Hobbes became a way of rethinking state power in the image of a nationalist contract. For scholars like Pramathanath Banerjea, K. P. Jayaswal, D. R. Bhandarkar, U. N. Ghoshal and H. N. Sinha, Hobbes’s Leviathan offered an intensely fecund way of reading Sanskrit and Pali texts. These readings balanced respect for a strong (national) state with a critical insistence on circumscribing state power and orienting it towards public welfare, and justifying the removal of rulers who failed to protect their subjects. Some of these intellectuals used Indian

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theories of social contract to critique Hobbesian ones, and thereby, to suggest that ancient India – in some cases, more intensely than modern Europe – had sought to circumscribe sovereign power. I have not found any direct references to Hobbes in peasant discourses. However, Rajavamshi arguments about the origins of rulership (prabhushasana) certainly bear comparison with Hobbesian ideas in terms of describing an originary conflictual state of nature (prakrti) which had to be tamed and transcended through governance. Unlike Hobbes, this discourse sharply insisted on the inadequacy of state governance, and therefore, on the need for continual cultivation of self-rule and freedom. If the 1910s constituted one significant moment of Hobbesian invocations in South Asia, then, in the mid-late 1940s, the Constituent Assembly of India provided another equally resonant platform, as the structure of state sovereignty in independent India was shaped in the form of a public contract. Several midlevel politicians in the Assembly invoked Hobbes, including Vishwambhar Dayal Tripathi, H. V. Kamath, Brajeshwar Prasad, Shankarrao Deo and Hyder Husein. Yet, as in earlier decades, there was no uniformity of voice here. If some invoked Hobbes to denounce the emerging postcolonial Indian state as a potential Leviathan, which – like its colonial ancestor – would endanger human freedom, others cited Hobbes with optimism, to argue that independent India, embodying the delegated sovereignty of its citizens, would be able to rescue its people from anarchy and poverty. To the extent that the independent Indian state was indeed a Hobbesian Leviathan, its birth was marked by acutely selfconscious disputes. Later, in the 1950s, Radhabinod Pal denounced Hobbes as part of a broader challenge against all conceptions of monistic sovereignty, a stance that can be directly related to his celebrated but complex dissenting judgment at the Tokyo Trial (1946–-48): a judgment which targeted the (neo-) imperial super-sovereignty that he accused Western powers of constructing in the name of international (criminal) justice. Studying such ‘sites of citation’4 as are offered by the presence of Hobbes’s Leviathan in colonial India constitutes only a first step. I have resorted to a broader array of arguments to conceptualise the ways in which modern forms of sovereignty emerged in India through contestations and dialogues between top-down visions of command on the one hand, and shared and collectivist understanding of authority, on the other. I have discussed the manner in which colonised actors designed new models of sovereign rulership in dialectical interface with the constructions of state sovereignty imposed upon them through

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 405

colonial rule. These designs often embodied future-oriented teleologies of social engineering and political emancipation, drawing on localised struggles for rights and justice, as well as translocally-connected constructions of political association, solidarity and freedom. The discourses on the ‘sovereign’ articulated, with varying degrees of clarity, blueprints for power-sharing in the colonial or (longed for) postcolonial polity.

Global history perspectives can considerably sharpen our understanding about why Indian actors consistently drew on examples from abroad, such as on the German, Italian, Japanese, Iranian, Iraqi, Afghan, or Siamese monarchies. A (forthcoming) volume co-edited by me explores the ways in which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted a global moment of production of ‘royal nations’: a long era when monarchies and nationalisms often symbiotically linked with each other to create powerful nation-states and/or nationalist imaginaries.5 In my own chapter in the above volume, I have suggested that this production of royal nationhood should be seen as a phenomenon of global intellectual history: it was not merely the result of instrumentalist impositions of opportunist ruling classes, but was driven by profoundly ideological assumptions. Monarchy – in conceptual terms, ‘the rule of one’ – provided a template for thinking about the nation as centralised around an ideological apex (often a real or imagined ruler). In my opinion, monarchy thus provided a conceptual way of thinking about a unitary locus of sovereignty for the nation.6 In the present volume, by focusing on Indian invocations of the German, Italian and Japanese monarchies, all centres of modern nation-state construction, as well as on Indian interactions with monarchs and ruling elites in West and South-East Asia, which saw the emergence of new nation-states or nationalist imaginaries in the interwar years, I have further delineated how political actors in different countries learnt from each other about organizing nationalist imaginaries and apparatuses of nation-state power around a historical and/or conceptual monarchic apex. There were dense transnational, or even global, learning effects at work here: political agents in widely dispersed societies in the late-nineteenth and early-mid-twentieth century actively and intensely learnt from each other in producing transnationalised models of royal nationhood, even as they transferred their own models to other countries. The fascinating thing about India is that it lacked a ‘real’ national monarchy, but this was no impediment, as this book has shown, to thinking about monarchy as a conceptual order – the rule of one as a discursive category – in organizing national unity.

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In colonial India, sovereign figures were often the sites for expressing economic interventions, ranging from British imperial schemes of revenue maximisation and Indian nationalist manifestoes of economic nationalism, to peasant aspirations for extinguishing high revenue, rent and debt burdens as well as working-class yearnings for better wages. Rural communities sometimes authored new formats of improving health, education and economic enterprise and well-being through vocabularies of shared and polycentric sovereign rulership. Concepts of rulership did not merely ‘legitimate’ material interests or fuel struggles for power, capital and status which existed exterior to them; they were the very sites through which these aspirations were often fleshed out. By focussing on the polyphonic, and often ‘vernacular’, registers through which colonised actors frequently articulated their concerns, this book has impelled us to think about popular dreamscapes and programmes of social welfare, ‘progress’ and democratised redistribution of material and ideological resources in novel ways. The sort of exemplars that I have highlighted can illuminate ways of political seeing and interpreting that can go beyond the kind of top-down strategies of developmentalism that James Scott has critiqued for ‘seeing like a state’, for ignoring local and subaltern knowledges, necessities and demands.7 To ‘see’, and see through, the sovereign figures can become acts of standing before a translucent mirror that simultaneously reveals and masks varied aspirations. The sovereign figure was often a superlative signifier, a lustrous stand-in, for many other desires for capturing, surrendering to, as well as disintegrating, diverse manifestations of power. I hope that the insights generated by my case studies will ultimately prove useful in investigating other comparable social contexts beyond South Asia. I have contextualised this book within debates on political theology, especially as enunciated by Carl Schmitt and E. H. Kantorowicz. Schmitt and Kantorowicz, in their varying ways, have shown how modern concepts of state sovereignty are rooted in Christian-origin ideas of monotheistic divinity. Of course, I do not intend to argue that monotheistic belief has been solely, or even primarily, about the construction of state power; to reduce the rich and profound textures of many varieties of monotheistic belief to some singular form of centralised political drive would be unbearably superficial and reductive. However, this book specifically focuses on select Hindu and Muslim thinkers who enracinated the national state in monotheistic notions of divinity and/or monistic principles of ethics and righteousness. Some of them even

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 407

conceptualised the polity as the body of an imagined divine, kingly, or ascetic ruler. By focusing on their argumentations, I have suggested that the pursuit of sovereignty intensified monotheistic aspects in South Asian piety, partly displacing polyarchies of deities and pir cults. However, such monotheistisation was never entirely successful. Sometimes, as I have shown in case of the goddess Kamteshvari or Kamta Ma, the ability of local communities to partly resist statist centralisation of power contributed to the resilience of local deities, obstructing the spread of British colonial and varying forms of South Asian nationalist monotheism. The writings of Bharatachandra and Bipin Chandra Pal demonstrate the theological negotiations through which local polities claimed to be regional representatives of a universal divinity, and thereby appropriated as well as resisted monotheistic languages of empire.

Again, a global history gaze is useful here. When British imperial actors conceptualised the monarch as a providential force, a sacralised figure, they were, in part, drawing on the relation between European colonialism and Christianity’s global spread. In contrast, Indian actors who invoked Jesus as an anti-colonial icon saw the Roman Empire as a predecessor of the British Empire: for them, the global might of imperial formations could be resisted from a colonial periphery. Bankimchandra’s imputation of an avatara status to Krishna, partly on the assumption that Krishna unified classical India like Cavour or Bismarck unified modern Italy or Germany, or Rabindranath’s ambivalent response to Shintoism and to Japanese political theology of divinising the emperor: these are exemplary of the ways in which ‘Hinduism’ took part in transnationally-oriented political-discursive churning. The Khilafat movement, with its invocation of Allah’s sovereignty against human empires, or, later, the complex negotiations between a deterritorialised model of Caliphate and a reterritorialised model of Pakistan as a divinely-mandated utopia: these offer other examples of the transnational orientation of South Asian political theologies. The globally-entangled spread of political theologies should not be seen, of course, in terms of unidirectional export – for example, the spread of European church-state models to South Asia – but also in terms of disruption and challenge (the Khilafat movement’s rejection of church-state binaries is paradigmatic), as well as in terms of the export to transnational audiences and readerships of new models of divine rulership produced by South Asian actors, from Vivekananda to Abul Hashim. The creation of the modern state in colonies like India ultimately entailed

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profound transformations in life-worlds. In his work on colonial Egypt, Timothy Mitchell has suggested that modernities, especially in their colonial instantiations, have often given birth to radically polarised notions of selfhood and alterity, ‘seeming to exclude the other absolutely from the self, in a world divided absolutely into two’.8 He suggests that ‘authority was now to appear as a generalised abstraction, with names like law or the state. Like meaning, it would now appear as a framework standing outside the real world’.9 I argue that for many British and Indian actors, imaginaries of sacral rulership gave an epic form to this generalised abstraction of state sovereignty. The colonial or national state pretended to be a transcendental force of morality and civilization that could providentially order the world from above, often violently riding roughshod over the lives, desires and politics of local actors. These projects often thrived on binaries, such as those dividing the colonial state from non-white subjects, or the dominant national community from excluded minority and subaltern populations. Giorgio Agamben has discussed how comparable theologies gave birth to authoritarian interpretations of economy and governance in Europe; I have taken a cue from some of his analyses. It would be naïve, however, to seek to transcend the ‘abstractions’ of state sovereignty by invoking some form of pure, primordial and non-abstract pre-Western regime of rulership. Many British and Indian actors manufactured such ideals of charismatic and ‘personal’ rulership, identifying these with the ‘Orient’s’ history. Yet, in effect, such notions of personal rule often merely reinforced state-led projects of fiscal extraction and military-administrative command. These ideals of ‘benevolent’ rulership championed the power of British and/or Indian elites over lower class Indian subjects. Images of sovereignty were also constructed in a gendered manner. Colonial and nationalist male elites often expressed their authority in a resolutely paternalist vein; Keshub Chunder Sen succinctly spoke about the ‘fathersovereign ’. Indian actors frequently domesticated Victoria’s queenship into a maternal presence. Nevertheless, female royal models and women political activists retained their capacity to challenge male monopoly of power and discursive production. Women took active part in the making of nationalist imaginaries of rulership, some of them, such as Sarala Devi and Sarojini Naidu, achieving enduring fame in the process. Many women played a significant role at subaltern levels, for instance in lower caste and peasant politics in northern Bengal and Tripura. The period also saw the gradual emergence of a feminist

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 409

consciousness. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s dream of a kingdom of women, Lady-land, was a formidable example. Her desire for a future when there would be a female Viceroy and when every woman would be a queen represented a daring subversion of masculinist models of power. In imagining their sovereign, Indian elites sometimes presented models of acclamatory rule. Rather than electoral democracy and representative governance, these discourses emphasised the constitution of patriotic unity and political leadership through vertical and charismatic forms of command which were supposedly acceptable to the people and rested on their collective acclaim. The focus of this acclaim could be a divine or a human sovereign. For instance, Rabindranath Tagore, in a famous song composed in 1911 (the first stanza of which has been accepted as the national anthem of independent India), embedded the unity of the Indian nation in the acclaim offered by all Indians to the divine monarch of the country. In interwar Bengal, acclamations to Pranavananda, conceptualised as an ascetic-divine ruler and avatara, were critical to the emergence of a militant notion of Hindu nationhood, one which also aspired to integrate peasants into its orbit of politics. Similarly, the construction of a monarchically-oriented proto-national Tripur Kshatriya community in the interwar years was embedded in the acclaims offered by community members and leaders to Tripura’s prince.

Acclamations – and more broadly, political rituals, whether performed on behalf of the colonial state or on behalf of various nationalist communities – often manifested a certain inwardness. Kingly rituals might invite and command the support of the people, but they did not necessarily depend for legitimacy on the multitudes (alone): quite often, whether in the name of an empire or of a national community, they relied for their legitimacy on their own sacralised performance, on the intrinsic being of power that they claimed to embody. Taking a cue from a recent discussion by Thomas Clément Mercier on Max Weber’s ideas on Herrschaft, I would argue that the ‘tautological’ nature of state rituals – the dependence of state power for legitimacy on the state’s own sovereign ‘self-presence’10 – was most visibly embodied in British colonial monarchic rituals, which blithely ignored what their audiences demanded from those rituals: for example, largesse or charity in reciprocation of reverence. But such an attitude of discursive enclosure – and obvious elitism – also characterised Indian nationalist festivals of kingship. Yet, in the latter instances, more so than in case of imperial rituals, ‘self-referentiality’ (to again draw on Mercier)

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was disrupted by a democratic imperative, by a felt need to give political – and ritual – agency to (sections of ) the people.

Acclamations often revealed these fecund contradictions, as popular activism deployed them for building capacious political communities. Thus, the cry ‘Gandhi Maharaj ki jai’ (Victory to Great King Gandhi) may have strengthened Congress authority in some ways, but it also voiced autonomous peasant and working class hopes for a better life and more just rule. At complete odds with elite Indian nationalism were early-twentieth century Rajavamshi acclamations to King-Emperor George V and to the Kshatriya spirit, which asserted a Rajavamshi claim of regal selfhood. On occasions, victory acclamations (jayadhvani) were used to construct a sense of unanimity among Rajavamshis, to articulate a kind of general will (in Rousseau’s sense) and mobilise the community against Congress elites on electoral issues.11 Today, the greeting ‘Jay Shiva Chandi’ (Victory to Shiva and Chandi) functions as an acclamation of challenge made by Rajavamshis to underline their claims to political autonomy against upper caste Indians.

Through acclamations, as much as through literature and ritual, many Indians affirmed a political theology of presence.12 These discourses on the embodied presence of sovereignty can be contrasted with Indian critiques of British governance as embedded in a fake and vacuous rulership which exploited rather than rendered benevolence. Bipin Chandra Pal’s Eucharistic conceptualisation of the Shivaji Festival as making the nation ‘tangible’ and ‘concrete’ mirrors Bernard Holland’s comparison of the British imperial monarchy with the ‘Real Presence’ of the sacrament. But Pal, in contrast to Holland, identified regality – and real presence – in ‘representative men’, that is, in Indian nationalists. Krishnakanta Barma suggested a different route to manifesting divine presence, through labour (kaj), enabling Rajavamshi peasants to gain self-mastery and manifest their divinity (bhagavatva), freeing themselves from the bestial state (pashubhava) to which upper caste ‘foreigners’ had reduced them. Such labour aimed at acquiring self-power (atmashakti), enabling peasants to organize themselves through regular meetings and discussions and enhance their social position.13 Here, the action of a community in its quotidian labour as well as collective deliberation and political organization constituted democracy, and indeed made popular sovereignty visible and manifest. Regal presence was however often mediated through political regimes of exclusion that exteriorised, and sometimes encouraged violence against, social others.

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Elite Indians often championed the nation-state on the assumption that the imagined ruler or the real-life nationalist politician would protect (raksha) the people and look after their welfare (hita) and progress (unnati). Frequently, they mirrored British imperial attitudes of being guardians and protectors of the masses. The shared etymological origins of ‘despot’ and pati14 reflect a deeper connection between British assertions of being modern versions of the Oriental despot, and Indian aspirations (such as of Rabindranath Tagore) that a samajpati should rule native society: in both cases conflating idioms of public authority and domestic/paternalist power. Apart from acclamatory and electoral models, a syntax of ‘pastoral’ power can also be detected here: the ruler-politician supposedly cared for the people. Michel Foucault’s theorisation on pastoral power is relevant here.15 There are historical connections between the discourses that Foucault has analysed and the sort that are discussed in this book, mediated, for instance, through shared Euro-Asian (including ancient Indo-European) grammars of governance. But there are equally significant differences, for instance, owing to the absence of a hegemonic Church in the Indian context. However, as Anand Pandian has shown for colonial and postcolonial southern India,16 it may still be fruitful to study South Asian history through a Foucauldian frame of pastoral rulership.

What fascinates me the most however is the distinctly subversive potential of pastoral imaginaries in lower caste voices, as those of Mahendranarayan Barma and Nirananda Barma. When intellectuals and politicians from cultivator and herdsmen community backgrounds identified peasants and shepherds with divinity and regality, tectonic shifts occurred in the constitution of caste and political order, even as narrative contracts of protection and obedience were re-inscribed. Some of these discourses also emphasised more equitable ethical relations with non-human actors, underscoring the welfare (and potential divinity) of all animate beings (sarvabhuta), rather than only of humanity. In case of elite Indian actors like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen, these radical modes of conceptualising the universal as an ethical category existed in tension with various sectarian-nationalist and anthropocentric biases. For peasant actors, these attitudes to the non-human (and especially towards cattle) were often grounded in economic as well as ethical imperatives stemming from everyday life. However, we need far more detailed research to ascertain how relationships with non-human forms of life structured new concepts of sovereign rulership in colonial India.

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Middle-class rebels as well as peasant and other labouring groups often forged their ideas of rulership at the jagged edges of life, at the sharp limits of an uncertain wager. Indian revolutionaries whose achievements were compared to those of avataras, and peasants who claimed to be divine and kingly or mobilised themselves around a constructed messiah, faced imprisonment, confiscation of property, and frequently, torture and death. They confronted ruling classes who exercised regality via stately force. Confronting such acts of sovereign violence, insurgent discourses were frequently kingly only in an acutely paradoxical mode, as outcries of subalternity angry at the world that was, and seeking to break out of incarceration, from the manacles of bruised and humiliated life. Muhammad Ali’s epiphanic announcement about the advent of God’s kingdom, or Shaukat Ali’s declaration of divine kingship and civic freedom, were ironic in the way in which they sought to fashion majesty out of the tatters of degradation: they were statements construed through processes of trial and punishment. Nabinchandra Barma offers a more quotidian, but no less dramatic, exemplar of this ironic fashioning of kingship: he proclaimed the kingliness of peasants, even as he described their everyday lives as constituted through starvation, disease and suicide. From these perspectives, sovereignty entailed a ‘putting at stake of life’, to re-deploy and concretise a provocative discussion by Derrida on Hegel and Georges Bataille.17 For many Indians studied in this book, martyrdom was the price to be paid to achieve kingliness; the martyred body, put at stake, was the denuded and visible altar of an alternative sovereignty. The subaltern who wished to be sovereign possessed a strangely unkinglike body: or rather, its kingliness was unrecognisable to hostile eyes. To attempt to be sovereign, to seek recognition, was to play with death: to instantiate practices of sacrificial sovereignty. We need to juxtapose the shrewd calculations of status, power and profit which this entailed, with the sacrificial surplus it called for. To aim at kingship from a position of subalternity and bondage was never merely about gaining mastery over others; this also entailed fragmenting various inequalities of power by risking life, one’s own and that of others. Concretely, lower caste attempts at becoming kingly Kshatriyas, or anti-colonial Indian projects at acquiring state sovereignty, were ineradicably ambiguous in both faithfully reproducing and radically disintegrating diverse forms of mastery, lordship and sovereign hierarchy. Reflections on rulership provoke broader conceptual questions about the

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implications of monarchic and monotheistic models for the structuring of modern state, or even communitarian, sovereignty. A world composed of many competing visions of monistic statehood, embedded in ideologies of sacred and secular rulership, fragments the possibility of global ethical unity and intensifies the likelihood of hatred and violence. Such ideologies obscure the many-layered and irreducibly rich diversity of human needs and hopes. We have always lived in a world of plurality, of political and social fragmentation. Monistic fables, embedded in bipolar visions of good and evil, have never adequately contained conflict; they have often resulted in legitimating projects of power construction and exploitation. This study has posited alternate genealogies of sovereignty that give greater conceptual space to anti-colonial political communities and to their complex and often schizophrenic attitudes. While many Indians adopted ideologies of monistic sovereignty and monotheistic political theology, they were also often critical towards these. Vivekananda and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, among others, experienced ambivalences about monotheistic political rulership. Rabindranath Tagore may have been enamoured of reformist rulership, but he was also one of the most creative exponents of a democratic political theology that identified divinity and regality in ordinary human beings and affirmed a non-sectarian politics of messianic hope. In a celebrated song (published as part of two allegorical works dealing with kingship), he articulated this ethos by making the commoner say: ‘We are all kings (raja) in this kingdom of our king, otherwise by what proprietary right (svatve) shall we unite with our king! […] We are not bound in the slavery of terror of a king of slaves.’18 Nivedita regalised common human beings to achieve a sensibility of popular sovereignty.

But it was in peasant politics that we find the sharpest articulations in India of collectivist understandings of sovereign rulership and divinity, accompanied by economic and electoral programmes which subalternised idioms of rights, liberties and progress. Peasants who identified themselves with divine avataras, with kingly dynasties, with Adam, or as figurations of Allah’s community, radicalised local worldviews about the superordinate locus of power and authority. I would compare my findings here with those of scholars who have studied ‘indigenous’ actors in North America and Oceania, and have described how the latter have built novel forms of democratic politics while trying to balance the aspiration for community identity and autonomy with care for individual rights and freedoms, even while continually struggling against

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white settler dominance and an often-hostile state. From their struggles for repossessing land to their negotiations with transformed residues of ‘indigenous’ rulerships, there is much to compare with the case of peasant politics in modern South Asia. Certain scholars, including James Tully and Iris Marion Young, have theorised on the lessons that precolonial ‘indigenous’ forms of governance may present to federalist and constitutionalist imaginaries of politics today.19 Like the American Iroquois, the Australian Aborigines and the Maoris of New Zealand, Indian peasant and ‘tribal’ groups have drawn in remarkable ways upon precolonial legacies in order to fashion ‘postcolonial’ modes of democratic politics, while battling against comparable contexts of dispossession of land, cultural repression, poverty and crises in community administration. Communitarian forms of power, ‘indigenous’ and ‘hybrid’, of course build their own asymmetries. Furthermore, pluralist forms of power (such as are advocated by proponents of constitutionalist and federalist models who ask us to respect cultural diversities) offer only partial answers to negotiating the complexities of democratic politics. One also needs more nuanced re-definitions of selfhood that work through and cut across (and do not merely reproduce and reinforce) ‘cultural’ boundaries. Here, I would mention that democratisation has occurred most deeply in India when egalitarian strands among nonBrahmanical communities have been strengthened through Western-origin democratic-socialist ideas and practices: when simultaneous critiques have been offered against local communitarian types of exploitation as well as translocal forms. In some of my case studies, as in modern Dalit and Adivasi politics in India generally, the actors concerned have targeted multiple intersections of oppression, along lines of caste, class and gender. A critique of state sovereignty is inseparable from a critique of any format of sovereignty, including those in communitarian forms. In India, colonial rule intensified social stratification by enhancing the power of literate Indian gentry, and by demilitarising and subjugating non-Brahmanical communities. I have highlighted models of rulership which emerged through interactions between these hierarchies and the forms of resistance they provoked. In general, the book has consistently underlined that to make sense of the dynamism of intellectual production in colonial India, one needs to move beyond binary thinking (‘Western’ versus ‘Indian’, and the like). An urge to study the intersections between multiple conceptual spaces motivates this book. I have no desire to argue either that ‘Western’ concepts have had complete primacy

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in modern Indian political intellection, or to suggest, in a primordialist vein, that ‘Eastern/Asian’, ‘South Asian’, ‘Indian’, or ‘Islamic’ thoughts, possessed of some inflexible and singular civilizational essences, have rescued Indian actors from Western intellectual hegemony. The former narrative reproduces a very naïve Eurocentrism, while the latter position can potentially legitimate sectarian (for example, Hindu nationalist or Islamist) triumphalism. Eschewing both postures, my interest lies in zooming in on specific actors and argumentation modes, to highlight how these drew on different globally-entangled as well as locally-instantiated practices of power and resistance, and to analyse what transformative effects they had. It is the focus on the specificity of actors and argumentation structures, and not a belief in civilizational formations, which governs and impels this work. If we investigate early-mid-twentieth century Rajavamshi politics, to take a very concrete example, we easily see how hard it would be to classify it in reductive civilizational terms, as either ‘Indian’ resistance to ‘Western’ statist modernity/sovereignty (the Rajavamshis were clearly inspired by many Western-origin democratic concepts and practices), or as a mere aftereffect of ‘Western’ idioms of political sovereignty (Rajavamshis drew very creatively on many localised community structures and precolonial-origin theologies of rulership that had little to do with a specifically, and provincially, European historicity.) This book has, therefore, urged for a focus on conceptual exercises that transversally cut across spatial and temporal borders. It may be asked whether critiquing state sovereignty serves any purpose in an age when the greatest menace to social equity is posed by the transnational aggression of capital, and when nation-states sometimes resist such predatory capital to promote and patronise the interests of their electorates, including of less privileged social strata.20 However, it needs to be remembered that nation-state sovereignty still underwrites the basic formats of power which allow transnational capital to thrive today, and which also maintain and reproduce class differences. Frequently, such sovereignty regimes produce violent chauvinisms which discriminate against minority groups and disempowered immigrants. National sovereignty, as this book has argued, has often re-inscribed imperial sovereignty in novel ways. A comparable point is made by Prasenjit Duara. Taking a cue from the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo, he has argued that twentieth century imperial formations sometimes facilitated, to a limited extent, economicindustrial development of their dependent territories, and even the construction of national identities, to deepen the reach of overall imperial influence.21

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Clearly, we need to simultaneously critique intra-state as well as inter-state hierarchies, internal colonialism by national ruling classes as well as neocolonial Western-dominated asymmetries of power. Our critique therefore provides a genealogy of, and so targets, not merely the sovereign state as such, but also the sovereignty of economic and administrative rules which, in the name of order, subalternises vast populations. This may be exercised by a formal empire, the sort which (as an Indian critic of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 noted) disguised itself in a kingly form, but did not conform to any ‘moral structure’, did not remit taxes, but only cared ‘for the symmetry and regularity of its administrative arrangements’.22 Such ‘sovereignty’ may be exercised by transnationally-embedded political, juridical, economic and military arrangements which have survived into the contemporary world, outliving the demise of formal empires. These formations of sovereignty have been incisively described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.23

From transborder militancy to environmental threats, from the operations of global capital to the influence of international organizations, regimes and concepts of state sovereignty have for quite some time now been riddled with challenges.24 Being satisfied with acknowledging state monopoly of sovereignty does not match ground realities, nor is it safe, given that this has secured diverse forms of violence and exclusion in formal imperial or neocolonial scenarios. Ronald Jennings has gone as far as to claim that there has been an excessive amount of thinking about sovereignty in recent years, and even those who claim to critique such projects have fallen into the trap of acknowledging the hegemony of sovereignty, as a conceptual as much as existential category: ‘What begins as critique may often end up as a kind of fetish, and sovereignty very much still remains the irresolvable Gordian object in contemporary critical scholarship.’ He argues that: we must not fail to recall once again that the very essence of the success of the project of political modernity has always been its ability – since Hobbes – to get its foes, as much as its advocates, to adopt its basic vocabulary and conceptual terms – and the concept of sovereignty, in particular – with grave consequences for both political scholarship and practice.25

I suggest that one way out of this assumed impasse is to think about sovereignty in an intrinsically disruptive way, rather than as a closed knot or a mysterium of fetish. Instead, we may see it as something always liable to

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 417

fragment, de-centre and proliferate itself, at least when ‘European’ (whatever this vague geography signifies) concepts are put in conversation with mutinous concepts arising from different parts of the world, including from colonised and subalternised territories.

In this context, acknowledging the sovereignty claims of non-state actors – and especially of ‘subaltern’ and inadequately enfranchised actors – can generate discourses which give them equal status in dialogue with state actors, while eschewing homogeneous constructions of  ‘popular sovereignty’ where the people are conceived of as having a singular will that can be articulated by a unitary and authoritarian state. The attempt to create a more diverse and egalitarian political field can in turn pave the way for new ethical techniques, indeed for new forms of freedom: ‘sovereignty’ can then, without forgetting itself, point to what lies in excess of it, and beyond it. We can look back not just to ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy, as Foucault did,26 but also to modern South Asian peasant discourses on atmashasana (self-rule), for clues about the competing demands of individual ethical autonomy, social and political diversity, and claims by the disenfranchised for material nourishment and self-sufficiency. These discourses inform us about how the struggle for individual freedoms can guide, and be enriched by, collective struggles for empowerment.

Historians, political scientists and philosophers have often challenged fables of unity by positing triumphalist celebrations of plurality and fragmentation. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have suggested that agonistic tensions are vital to democratisation.27 I believe that it is inadequate to merely admire unresolved political tensions. In colonial India, such contestations often had a catastrophic impact, for instance in sustaining violent confrontations between Hindus and Muslims. Many conflicts which plague the world today are results of unresolved polarities between sovereign state order and communitarian fracturing of power, between actors who have successfully asserted some monopoly over sovereign authority and those who hunger to win such dominance for themselves. Behind this lies a problem of ethics, which is perhaps also the central problem raised by this book: how can one reconcile the ethical, political and normative homogeneity which sovereign arrangements often demand, with the realities of conflicting ideological and material aspirations of various communities and classes? Some of the Indian actors studied here meditated on these problems and tried to offer solutions on how these polarities could be overcome. These were

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often finally predicated on imagining the immanence of sacred rulership in all creation. If we try to create an ‘ideal’ typological statement which synthesises their critical responses to our central problem, then it can be framed as follows: it is true that there is a certain unitary structure underlying the way in which we envisage the divine and related principles of righteousness and justice, but it is equally true that divinity and rulership are present in all and are understood by different people in different ways. Therefore, rather than being satisfied with unitary (imperial, national, communitarian) political selves, one ought to engage with, understand and accommodate social others. The unity of the divine, the contours of what is right and good, can never be encompassed by any singular human political structure, by any singular formation of sovereignty. No single figure of sovereignty can claim to entirely translate the divine into the human, and posit itself as the superordinate locus of ‘ethical’ power and ultimate source of protection, duty and obedience: as, in effect, a ‘mortal god’. Kazi Nazrul Islam would be someone who comes closest to representing many of these strands; he presented political and theological models that gave agency to peasants and other labouring communities, to women and to individuals from different sectarian groups, while avoiding monistic interpretations of communitarianism which valorised sectarian violence and patriarchy. The divine was to be identified in the mirror of the self as well as through solidarities with others. Peasant movements emphasised theological ethics and simultaneously sought to collectivise divineregal presence among peasant communities and labour practices like tilling the land, as highlighted by Upendranath Barman, among others.

In varying ways, these solutions implied the reconciliation of political sovereignty and ethical motivation with the recognition of socio-economic and political pluralities. I have argued that such negotiations sometimes involved a kind of ‘mobile’ thinking. Rajavamshi reports from the late 1910s, for example, conceptualised rule (shasana) in terms of a motion, whereby the rule of the other – heteronomy – was, through sequential stages, made into a servant of self-rule, until self-rule too was negated and transcended to erase all governance in a joyous life of freedom (see Chapter 4). Or, to consider another example, in 1922, Nazrul Islam envisaged svaraj or self-rule as a movement whereby human beings ceased to alienate their authority to (human or divine) others, and thereby ceased to be slaves. Instead, by negating alienation, which itself was a kind of negation of the self, and thus through a movement of double negation, they emerged as kings, as masters, in a world where everyone could

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Conclusions and Further Thoughts 419

be king (see Chapter 5). Such an ideology unpacked the relation of dependence between mastery and slavery, and conceptualised freedom as a mastery which was utterly non-dependent on bondage (of oneself or of others). Kingship or divinity – or, as I would argue, in fact, sovereignty – was thus liberated from any intrinsic and ineradicable relation to subjection. This book has analysed many other fascinating and variegated pathways through which Indian actors – from different social strata – sought to negotiate between sovereignty and freedom, between ethical monism and social pluralism. Such complex solutions were obviously not always realised in practice. But when they were activated, the tension between the implicit monism of ethical certitude and government and the inclusionary and pluralistic belief in divine-regal presence among all beings produced dialectically creative ripples which influenced democratic politics and intellectual practice. In a sense, political modernities impart divinity to everyday life and people, creating charged links between immanent realities and transcendental visions of re-ordering society, rendering human beings into ‘mortal gods’ who aim to be autonomous and perfectible. I would highlight the oxymoronic tension in the phrase ‘mortal god’, a simultaneous declaration of mortality and divinity, of real-historical limitations on the one hand, as well as of a constant momentum to overcome these limits, on the other. Current public debates are generally polarised between those who advocate some sort of universalistic ordering of the world through various principles of state sovereignty, liberalconstitutional politics, market capitalism, socialist activism, or argumentative and communicative rationality, on the one hand, and those who advocate democratisation based on the acknowledgement and even active championing of ‘difference’, of radical agonism, social fragmentation and polycentricity of identities and opinions, on the other. Such polarised debates have important implications on the ways in which we may conceptualise future horizons of democratic struggle and political representation.28 This book advocates a third space, a space which is neither enamoured of universalistic metanarratives that ultimately gird and impel all visions of sovereignty, nor of absolutist incredulity towards these narratives (in the sense that Jean-François Lyotard defined the ‘postmodern’).29 Neither an uncritical appreciation of the local/communitarian nor a triumphalist definition of the universal is offered here. Rather, this study calls for an inclusionary ethics from below, painstakingly crafted through multipolar engagements with social outsiders, a gaze which makes possible dialogues

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between different fragmented subjectivities arising from different parts of the world. Different visions of justice approach each other, in conversation and competition, to produce complex ethical selves in such a landscape. I study the historical formation of certain transcontinentally-connected debates on modern rulership and sovereignty, the operations of sovereignty which create borders between insiders and outsiders, and the techniques through which these borders can be transcended. And these acts of transcendence are genealogically discussed, not as rigid universals, but as situationally constituted from below and always created afresh to respond to newer and newer exigencies of sharing power with social outsiders and marginals.

Democratically-oriented visions of sovereignty and rulership in a globalising postcolonial world can then be better appreciated in all their complexities: as the products of endeavours rooted in transregional circulations of political forms as well as in localised grievances, fantasies of justice and strategies of struggle; as dreams which have been crafted for fighting against various forms of hierarchy and exclusion, even as they have themselves become contaminated with different eruptions of power. We realise that the sort of political modernity envisaged in them do not emerge as gifts of the colonisers to the colonised, nor even as bestowals of postcolonial elites to subalterns, but as complex products born at the intersections of diverse ways of conceptualising a better life for oneself and for others, accompanied sometimes by the hope of forging a more just world. An intellectual-historical study of sovereignty claims among anti-colonial groups can offer tools for thinking about decolonising and subalternising sovereignty, going beyond Hobbes’s ‘mortal god’. It aims to enhance understanding of radical politics in the postcolonial world and provide a democratic political theology rooted in the acknowledgment of the sovereignty or even ‘divinity’ of multiple others. The recognition of the other as divine represents a moment of dazzling epiphany, a piercing transformation of one’s own political being. Such an acknowledgment invites or even compels us to act towards the other in a spirit of justice, to accept the limitations of our ability to know what is ultimately right and just, and to strive to expand our horizons of ethics through conversations with the other, to tremble and recognise that the other is a masterly being and not a being who can be enslaved; that even if the other is an impoverished peasant, he or she is ‘an ever reigning god, a human god’.30

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Endnotes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

Preben Bonnen, Towards a Common European Security and Defence Policy: The Ways and Means of Making It a Reality, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003, 39. Charles Barbour and George Pavlich (eds.), After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. For example, Stokes, English Utilitarians; Mukherjee, India in Shadows.

Manjapra, ‘Transnational Approaches’, 288, citing Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra and Cathleen Sarti (eds.), Transnational Histories of the Royal Nation, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017 (forthcoming).

Milinda Banerjee, ‘The Royal Nation and Global Intellectual History: Monarchic Routes to Conceptualizing National Unity’, in ibid.

James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 167. Ibid., xvi.

10 Thomas Clément Mercier, ‘Resisting Legitimacy: Weber, Derrida, and the Fallibility of Sovereign Power’, Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought 6(3) 2016: 374–91. 11 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 66–69.

12 On presence, my thoughts have obviously been stimulated by the writings of Jacques Derrida. For a recent provocative discussion, see also Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. 13 For Holland and Pal, see Chapters 1 and 3. For Barma, Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 57–59.

14 Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-Européennes, vol. 1, Paris : Les Editions de Minuit, 1969, 246, 295–96, 304–5. 15 Chapter 4 of this book takes a cue from Foucault while reading Rajavamshi and GopYadav politics. 16

Anand Pandian, ‘Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal Animal in South India’, Cultural Anthropology 23(1) 2008: 85–117.

17 Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ (1967), in Writing and Difference, translation with introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 2006, 321, 334.

18 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Raja’ (1910), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 5, 674; ‘Aruparatan’ (1920), in Ravindrarachanavali, vol. 6, 562. 19

James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders (eds.), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge

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The Mortal God University Press, 2000, and especially the article by Iris Marion Young, ‘Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project’, 237–58.

20 See for example: Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron (eds.), Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

21 Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity; Prasenjit Duara, ‘Nationalism, Imperialism, Federalism, and the Example of Manchukuo: A Response to Anthony Pagden’, Common Knowledge 12(1) 2006: 47–65. 22 Navavibhakar Sadharani, 28 February 1887, translated extract in RNPB.

23 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

24 Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996; Christopher J. Bickerton, Philippe Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch (eds.), Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations, Abindgon: University College London Press, 2007; Trudy Jacobsen, Charles Sampford and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), Re-envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia?, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008; Peter Gratton, The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012; Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 25

Ronald C. Jennings, ‘Sovereignty and Political Modernity: A Genealogy of Agamben’s Critique of Sovereignty’, Anthropological Theory 11(1) 2011: 51–52.

26 See for instance: Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; The Government of Self and Others, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; The Courage of the Truth, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 27 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, London: Verso, 1993; The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000; On the Political, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso: London, 2001 (1985).

28 For two recent discussions that capture this climate, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Subaltern Studies and Capital ’, Economic and Political Weekly 48(37) 2013: 69–75; Kieran O’ Connor, “‘Don’t They Represent Us?” A Discussion between Jacques Rancière and Ernesto Laclau’, 26 May 2015, available at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2008don-t-they-represent-us-a-discussion-between-jacques-ranciere-and-ernesto-laclau, accessed on 21 June 2015.

29 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 (1979). 30 Kshatriya Samiti, Ashtadash Varshik Adhiveshan, Karya Vivaran, 1927, 14, discussed in Chapter 4.

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Index Abhisheka, 179–80, 202, 213, 376–78 Acclamation, Acclamatory, 34, 88, 165–66, 213, 255, 259, 303, 317–18, 354, 376-77, 409-11 Achaemenid, 25, 256–58 Adam, 384–85, 413 Afghanistan, Afghan, 30, 51, 65, 205, 260-61, 362-63, 402, 405 Agamben, Giorgio, 55, 226, 408 Aguri, Ugra Kshatriya, 296 Ahalya Bai, 195, 204, 206 Ahmad, Ilyas, 238, 403 Ahmad, Muzaffar, 261, 363, 367 Ahmed, Abul Mansur, 168, 382, 385 Ahom, 10, 192 Akbar, 27, 63–64, 88, 195, 212, 313 Ali, Ameer, 224 Ali, Muhammad, 231, 243, 352, 358–59, 361, 364, 403, 412 Ali, Shaukat, 352, 358, 412 Ali, Syed Mujtaba, 260–61 Alwar, 114, 315 Amanullah, 30, 260–61, 362 Ambedkar, B. R., 247, 290, 315, 324 America, United States, American, 24, 27, 30, 55–56, 163, 166, 170, 176, 182, 189, 191, 197, 217, 220, 222, 248, 261, 322, 352, 367–68, 370–71, 374, 413–14 Anglo-Catholic, 209 Annadamangal, 28 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 53

Anushilan Samiti, 171, 319, 380

Arabia, Arab, Arabic, 30, 61–62, 216, 224, 238–39, 259–61, 357, 365, 384 Armenian, 179, 256

Arya, Aryan, 135, 174–75, 181, 235–37, 259, 291, 299, 322 Ascetic, 21, 31, 114, 141, 198, 219, 225–27, 295, 303, 321–22, 350, 352–53, 356, 368, 372–75, 377–80, 384, 402, 407, 409 Ashoka, 25, 182–83, 185, 234 Ashrama, 372

Assam, Assamese, 1, 116, 134, 188, 192, 207, 297, 313–14, 316–17, 326, 332, 334, 356 Aurangzeb, 27, 185, 244 Aurelius, Marcus, 227 Austin, John, 111

Avatara, 21, 29, 33, 36, 166, 176, 182– 83, 188, 200, 208–09, 214, 218–19, 243, 314, 325–26, 350, 352, 355, 364, 366, 371, 402, 407, 409, 412–13 Azad, Abul Kalam, 358, 361 Babylon, 220, 234 Bagdi, 297

Balarama, 323–24, 366 Bali, 252–54, 254, 402 Ballalasena, 327

Bandyopadhyay, Hemchandra, 142 Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar, 186

Banerjea, Pramathanath, 229–31, 233, 236, 403

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Banerjea, Surendranath,163, 179–180, 212–17, 264, 361, 376, 401 Bari, Abdul, 361–62 Barma, Krishnakanta, 325, 328, 410 Barma, Mahendranarayan, 321, 411 Barma, Nabinchandra, 322, 412 Barma, Nirananda, 321, 411 Barma, Panchanan, 3, 21, 318, 322, 324–26, 333 Barma, Rajchandra, 329 Barman, Bangshi Badan, 1 Barman, Upendranath, 319, 321, 323, 418 Baroda, 78, 112–13 Barter, 133 Belur Math, 372 Benares, 115, 127, 169, 212, 373–75, 378–79 Bengal Legislative Council, 75, 324 Bengal School of Art, 192, 209 Bhakti, 84, 86, 168, 176, 192–93, 200, 218 Bhandarkar, D. R., 230–33, 403 Bharatachandra, 28–29, 407 Bharat Sevashram Sangha, 374, 380 Bharatiya Jana Sangh, 375, 380 Bharatiya Janata Party, 290, 375, 380 Bhasani, Maulana, 385 Bhil, 187, 196–97, 355 Bhopal, 112, 139, 204, 206–07 Bhumij, 297 Bhutan, 116–17, 143 Birdwood, George, 62, 215–16 Blackstone, William, 54–55 Bodin, Jean, 11–13, 83, 197, 262, 399 Bombay, 77–80, 86, 125, 162–64, 167, 174, 205–07, 210, 212, 215, 248, 290, 363, 380, 403

Index

Bose, Ananda Mohan, 119–20, 137 Bose, Jagadish Chandra, 142 Bose, Nandalal, 209

Bose, Subhas Chandra, 173, 243

Brahman, 29, 87, 170, 176–77, 222, 365 Brahmattar, 117

Brahmin, 26–27, 29, 111–12, 114, 117, 134–35, 141, 174–75, 182, 186, 194, 202, 204, 212, 214–16, 223, 233–38, 252, 254–55, 290, 291–300, 303, 309–10, 314–15, 319–22, 325–27, 335–36, 373, 376, 380, 414 Brahmo, 95,118–21, 123, 125, 127–28, 135, 145, 172, 177–78, 222–23 Brahmo Samaj of India, 118 New Dispensation Church of the Brahmo Samaj, 128 Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 118, 121

Buddha, Buddhist, 25, 73, 114, 135, 165, 182–83, 218, 224, 230, 232, 243, 255, 380 Burke, Edmund, 53

Burma, 58, 70, 132, 134, 232, 302, 376 Byzantine, 191, 362

Caesar, 51, 61–62, 65, 80, 182, 212, 214, 217, 263–64, 360, 401–02

Caliphate, Caliph, Khalifa, 89, 168, 185, 224, 238–39, 244, 259, 350–51, 357, 359, 363, 382, 407 Carlyle, Thomas, 123, 178, 241

Catholic, 114, 119, 121–22, 209 Census, 174, 298–301, 315

Ceylon, Sri Lanka, 182–83, 205–06, 220, 232, 239 Chaitanya, 213

Chanakya, Kautilya, 229–30, 232, 234–35 Chand Bibi, 195, 204, 206

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Chandi, 313–14, 334, 410 Chandragupta Maurya, 165, 184, 194, 234–35 Chatterji, Suniti Kumar, 252, 254–55, 258–59 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 23, 166, 175–77, 186, 192–93, 196, 198, 201, 212, 217–19, 222, 225, 235, 326, 372, 403, 407, 411 Anandamatha, 218, 225 Devi Chaudhurani, 198, 218–19, 225 Dharmatattva, 166, 192, 217–18 Krishnacharitra, 166, 218, 222 Rajasimha, 186 Chilarai, 314, 334 Chitrangada, 199 Church, 16, 26, 28, 69, 81–83, 114, 119, 122–23, 128, 135, 144, 261, 320, 357, 359, 372, 402, 407, 411 Civil Disobedience Movement, 371 Cold War, 244 Commonwealth, 91 Communism, Communist, 4, 21, 24, 218, 231, 244, 261, 296–97, 306–11, 330, 333, 350, 352, 363, 368, 370–71, 381, 385–86 Communist Party of India, 308, 363 Constantinople, 362, 402 Constituent Assembly of India, 227, 234–35, 245–51, 404 Constitution, Constitutionalist, Constitutionalism, 15, 17, 24, 31, 35, 53, 55, 60–61, 66, 70–71, 77, 88, 92, 119–21, 124–26, 144, 163–64, 171, 180, 187, 190, 223–25, 228–33, 235–39, 245–50, 263, 293, 301, 310, 321, 333, 361, 383, 400–02, 409, 411, 414, 419 Cooch Behar, 1–2, 7, 15, 83, 108, 114–30, 143, 145, 147, 201–03, 296, 298, 312–35

Index 427

Cornwallis, Lord 57 Coronation durbar, 66–67, 84, 87, 90 Curzon, Lord, 66–68, 79, 91, 137, 140, 202 Dalit, 2, 292, 332, 414 Danda, 197–200, 365 Dante, 189 Dara Shikoh, 27, 365 Darshana, 23, 113, 365, 371–72 Das, Chittaranjan, 254 Das, Pulinbehari, 171 Daulat Qazi, 29 Dayanand Saraswati, 223 Deb, Dasarath, 299, 306–10 Deo, Shankarrao, 248, 404 Depressed Classes, 290, 324, 373–74, 378 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian, 185 Derrida, Jacques, 198, 412 Devi, Gayatri, 128, 333–34 Devi, Sarala, 113, 211–12, 408 Devi, Sunity, 115, 118, 125–26, 128, 143, 201–03 Devi, Swarnakumari, 186–87, 196 Dharma, 19, 22, 29, 174–75, 182, 184, 193, 197, 218, 227, 232–33, 235, 240, 248, 255, 317, 320, 325, 327, 333, 352, 354, 371, 376–77, 379 Dharmarajya, 166, 174, 177, 182, 184, 352, 371, 376–77 Dharmarashtra, 232, 377, 379 Dharmayuddha, 174, 184, 317 Disraeli, Benjamin, 59–61, 68 Divine economy, 115, 120 Divine will, 121 Dominions, 67 Dufferin, Lord, 65, 68, 70 Dumézil, Georges, 25, 237

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Index

Durga, 88, 195, 211, 306, 323, 375, 378–79 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 185 Dutt, R. C., 113, 166, 178, 215 Edinburgh, Duke of, 75, 82 Edward VII, 66, 75, 82, 84, 86, 128, 203, 358 Edward VIII, 75, 89–90 Egypt, Egyptian, 30, 68, 205, 216–17, 261, 316, 408 English East India Company, 55, 58, 110, 116 Eucharistic, 69, 208, 410 Eusebius of Caesarea, 17, 23 Faisal I, 259–60 Famine, 76–77, 82–83, 168, 180, 213, 368–69, 383 Feudalism, Feudal, 26, 29, 65, 109, 111, 204, 310 First World War, Great War, 30, 75, 168, 173, 222, 297, 315, 317, 323, 350–52, 402 Foucault, Michel, 320, 411, 417 France, French, 11–12, 19, 26–27, 51, 53–56, 59, 61, 67–68, 91, 111, 166, 170, 188, 191, 202, 207, 218–19, 237, 241, 291, 316, 370 French Revolution, 207, 218–19, 370 Frere, Henry Bartle, 69, 71 Gandhi, Mahatma, Gandhian, 21, 31–32, 86, 89–90, 145, 169–70, 173, 226–27, 235, 249, 254, 258, 324, 351–57, 361, 365, 371–73, 380–81, 402, 410 George V, 19, 69, 73, 75–76, 80, 84, 87–90, 113, 165, 203, 298, 317, 358, 410 George VI, 90

Germany, German, 15, 19, 23, 30, 59, 61–62, 67, 111, 162, 166–68, 191, 203, 217, 240–41, 247, 251, 263, 402, 405, 407 Ghose, Aurobindo, 20, 113, 170–72, 181, 190–91, 214, 236, 264 Ghosh, Girishchandra, 76, 182 Ghosh, Manmathanath, 171–72 Ghosh, Nabinchandra, 321 Ghoshal, U. N., 232–33, 235, 403 Gladstone, William, 60, 78 ‘God Save the Queen’, 74 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 169 Gop, Goala, Yadav, 293, 296–97, 321 Gosanimangal, 313 Goswami, Rajendranath Smrtiratna, 319–20, 325 Great Depression, 351, 368–70, 379 Greater Cooch Behar, 1–2, 313, 333–34 Greater India, 251 Greece, Greek, 181, 185, 191, 194, 202, 236–37, 320 Grotius, Hugo, 197, 232, 262 Gujarat, 255, 355, 371 Habsburg, 19, 30, 47, 51, 60, 64, 68, 91, 402 Harishchandra, Bhartendu, 75 Hashim, Abul, 244, 382, 407 Hastings, Warren, 53 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 412 Hitasadhani, 331 Hitler, Adolf, 240, 243 Hobbes, Thomas, Hobbesian, 7–9, 13, 17, 24, 31, 34, 54, 179, 190, 210, 229–33, 238, 245–51, 262, 360, 399, 403–04, 416, 420 Leviathan, 7, 17, 179, 190, 230, 238, 246, 249–50, 376, 403–04

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Index 429

Holland, Bernard, 69, 410 Holy Roman Empire, 26, 59 Home Rule, 72, 77, 87, 167 Hossain, Mir Mosharraf, 184, 225 Vishada Sindhu, 184, 225 Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat, 204–05, 409 ‘Sultana’s Dream’, 205 Husein, Hyder, 250, 404 Hyderabad, 74, 112–14, 147, 205, 358, 381 Imperator, Imperatrix, 16, 61, 66 Imperium, 59, 66, 69–70 Indentured labourers, 170, 206 Indian National Congress, 75, 78, 91, 113, 120, 145–46, 165–66, 169, 171, 181–82, 206–07, 236, 240, 245, 258, 263–64, 290, 296, 305, 307–08, 310, 330, 352, 356, 368–69, 373–74, 410 Indigo revolt in Bengal, 80 Indo-European, 25, 235–37, 320, 411 Indonesia, 254 Indo-Saracenic, 68 Iran, Iranian, 25, 27, 30, 145, 169, 252, 256–59, 261, 292, 320, 402, 405 Iraq, Iraqi, 30, 259–61, 402, 405 Ireland, Irish, 83, 210, 242, 364, 370 Iqbal, Muhammad, 239, 367 Islam, Kazi Nazrul, 22, 239–40, 258–60, 363–67, 371–72, 384, 418 Italy, Italian, 19, 30, 51, 64, 68, 91, 111, 162, 166–67, 190, 240–42, 251, 263, 359, 402, 405, 407 Jahnava of Tripura, 139, 204 Janaka, 135, 322–24 Japan, Japanese, 4, 19, 27, 30, 34, 67, 145, 162–64, 168–73, 200, 210, 222, 241, 251, 261–63, 302, 369, 402, 405, 407, 415

Java, Javanese, 253–54, 402 Jayaswal, K. P., 228–31, 403 Jew, Jewish, Judaic, 80, 170, 175, 207, 220, 243, 360 Jhalo Malo, 297 Jhansi, Rani of, 187, 195, 204, 370 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 243–44 Jivatma, 3 Jones, William, 56 Jubilee, 16, 69, 76, 83, 90, 128–29, 416 Justinian, 56 Kaikobad, 184

Kaisar-i-Hind, 61–62

Kaiser, 61–62, 78, 126, 166, 168 Kalki, 22, 355, 370

Kamakhya, 127, 314, 318, 334 Kamar, 297

Kamata, 313–14, 332–34

Kamath, H. V., 246–47, 404

Kamta Ma, Kamteshvari, 334–35, 407 Kamtapur, 313, 332–34

Kantorowicz, E. H., 16, 27, 311, 354, 406 Kautilya, 229–30, 232, 234–35 Kayastha, 114, 296, 374

Khan, Syed Ahmed, 224

Khan, Syed Gholam Hossein, 54 Khetri, 114

Khilafat, 22, 33, 89, 352, 357–59, 361–64, 371, 407 Khilat, 302

Kipling, Rudyard, 65

Koch, 2, 131, 297, 313–15, 332–34 Kolhapur, 112, 298

Korea, Korean, 173

Krishna, 114, 135, 165–66, 169, 174–76,

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Index

197, 201, 209, 257, 297, 322, 325, 366–67, 370–71, 377, 407 Kshatra, 26, 33, 233, 262, 292, 302, 312 Kshatriya, 3, 21, 26, 33, 114, 135, 141, 167, 169, 171, 183, 196, 219–20, 235, 289, 291–304, 307–08, 312, 314–30, 332–33, 335, 373, 377–78, 401, 409–10, 412 Kshatriya Samiti, 3, 315–19, 321–22, 324–330, 332–33 Kshatriyaisation, 292–96, 301, 303, 321 Kuki, 131–33, 138, 143, 301, 306 Kurmi-Mahato, 297

Lyall, Alfred, 16–17, 19, 91, 138, 179, 403

Lakshmanasena, 209 Lakshmi, 120, 137, 142, 144–45, 193, 195 Law, Jean, 54–55 Legislation, 31, 194 Arms Act of 1878, 83, 113 Charter Act of 1833, 57, 110 Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, 187 Government of India Act of 1858, 58 Government of India Act of 1919 (Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms), 3, 70–72, 207, 228, 230–231, 301, 318, 324, 352, 403 Government of India Act of 1935, 306 Indian Councils Act of 1861, 70 Indian Councils Act of 1909 (Morley-Minto Reforms), 70–71, 324 Indian Press Act of 1910, 187 Rowlatt Act of 1919, 80, 104 Royal Titles Act of 1876, 59, 61, 82 Vernacular Press Act of 1878, 83 Leitner, G. W., 61 Lenin, Vladimir, 240, 244, 363, 371, 381 Locke, John, 210, 230, 233, 238, 384–85

Maine, Henry, 111, 138

Lytton, Lord, Governor of Bengal, 90

Lytton, Lord, Viceroy, 61–62, 64, 76, 79, 83, 399 MacDonald, Ramsay, 69, 189

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 190, 240

Mahabharata, 25, 131, 165–66, 174, 189, 230, 232–33, 253, 321 Mahdi, 21–22, 33, 350, 357, 359, 362, 401 Mahishya, 296

Malleson, G. B., 63 Mangalakavya, 28

Manikya, Bir Bikram Kishore, 142, 300, 304–307, 309–311 Manikya, Birchandra, 133–37, 299

Manikya, Ishanchandra, 132–33, 136 Manikya, Radha Kishore, 136–37, 139–42

Manipur, 132, 134, 138, 147, 293, 301

Maratha, 10, 27, 53–55, 108, 113, 164, 167, 173–74, 177, 181, 184, 186, 190, 192, 204, 210–11, 216, 293, 297, 312, 403 Marxism, Marxist, 239, 248

Mastery, 10, 21, 24, 124, 180, 242, 289, 292, 320–21, 353, 367, 371, 384, 410, 412, 419 Atmashakti, 325, 328, 410 Atmashasana, 21, 328, 417 Bhagavatva, 21, 325, 410 Bhupala, 21, 320–21 Kshatriyatva, 21, 33, 319, 325 Lokapala, 21, 320–21 Malik, 61–62, 384 Naradeva, 21, 200, 320, 325

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Index 431

Prabhu, Prabhutva, 186, 196, 240, 320–21, 327–28, 404 Shasana, 21, 85, 327–28, 404, 417–18 Maurya, 25, 165, 184, 194, 234–35, 297 Mazzini, 91, 188, 208, 241 Mecca, 184, 239, 383 Medina, 184, 225 Mehta, Pherozeshah, 79, 182, 223 Mesopotamia, 316 Messiah, Messianic, 4, 6–7, 10, 13, 21–22, 27–28, 32–33, 127, 168, 170, 181, 183, 189, 214, 219, 243, 350–57, 359, 361–64, 367–72, 375, 380–82, 384–87, 398, 402, 412–13 Mexico, 68, 173 Mikado, 169–71 Mill, James, 57, 110 Mill, John Stuart, 63–64, 91, 218 On Liberty 63 Moderate – Extremist, 77, 163, 171, 181–82, 212–13, 223 Monism, Monistic, 14–17, 19, 23, 31, 51–52, 58, 62, 108, 147, 172, 177, 209, 220–21, 263, 336, 357, 399, 400, 401, 404, 406, 413, 418–19 Immanentist monism, 172 Monotheism, Monotheistic, 15–18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 33, 114–15, 118–19, 121, 123, 126–28, 130, 143, 147, 163, 165, 170, 172, 175–78, 184–85, 217, 220–22, 224, 239, 256–59, 262, 335, 377, 382–83, 385, 400–01, 406–07, 413 Montagu Declaration of 1917, 71, 318–19 Mookerjee, Syama Prasad, 375, 378 Mookerji, Radhakumud, 188, 191, 231, 234–35 Moonje, B. S., 240, 243 Morison, Theodore, 68

Mughal, 10, 27–29, 53–54, 57–58, 63–64, 67–68, 85–86, 88, 109, 134, 138, 164, 181, 186, 192, 195–96, 203, 209, 211–12, 219, 244, 298, 302, 313, 357, 365–66, 372, 399 Muhajir, 363 Muhammad, Prophet, 29, 184–85, 203, 238, 259, 353, 358, 363, 383 Mujaddid, 350, 364, 384 Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev, 18–19, 57, 196–97, 376, 403 Svapnalabdha Bharatavarsher Itihasa, 18 Mukti Parishad, 308–10 Munda, 80, 176, 378 Muslim League, 239, 331, 352, 358, 375, 379, 383, 385 Mussolini, Benito, 145, 240–43 Mysore, 56, 111–14, 141–42, 297, 301, 373 Naidu, Sarojini, 113, 182, 195, 205, 207, 239, 254, 408 Nair, Sankaran, 230–31 Namashudra, 324, 332, 376–79 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 78, 113 Napoleon III, 61, 68 Narayan, Jagaddipendra, 318, 331, 333 Narayan, Nripendra, 1, 115, 118, 125–28, 130, 143 Narayan, Rajendra, 202, 318 Narayani Sena, 1 Nazism, Nazi, Third Reich, 15, 23, 173, 241, 243, 263 Nazr, 300–02 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 31, 146, 183, 227, 234–35, 245, 263, 401 Nehru, Motilal, 254 Nepal, 188, 229, 243, 293, 300–01, 323, 374

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Index

New Dispensation, 123, 128, 202 Nivedita, 79, 169, 173, 182–83, 203–05, 209, 413 ‘Matriarchate’, 203 Non-Cooperation, 22, 89, 351, 353, 356, 360–63, 368, 371 Norman Conquest, 19 Nota Manus, 54–55, 403 Okakura, Kakuzo, 169 The Ideals of the East, 169 Oraon, 168, 176 Orissa, 126, 145, 207, 296, 300, 355, 361, 374–75 Ottoman, 27, 51, 61–62, 89, 168, 185, 259, 350–51, 357, 362, 364, 402 Padmini, 193, 206 Pagal Bidroha, 225 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah, 259 Pahlavi, Reza Shah, 256–258 Pakistan, 244, 307, 331, 382–83, 385–86, 407 Pal, Bipin Chandra, 83, 119, 170, 172, 178, 207, 221, 236, 376, 407, 410 Pal, Radhabinod, 261, 404 Papacy, Pope, 119, 135, 359, 402 Papal infallibility, 119, 122 Paramatma, 3, 365 Parashurama, 297, 314, 370 Pastoral, 3, 26, 28, 55–56, 292–94, 296, 313, 320–21, 332, 411 Permanent Settlement of 1793, 57, 74 Persia, Persian, 12, 54, 61–62, 67, 169, 171, 181, 220, 257–58, 365 Peterson, Erik, 23 Philippines, Filipino, 220 Pilate, 360 Pilsudski, Jozef, 240

Plato, 183, 227–28, 234 Pod, Paundra Kshatriya, 297, 324, 378 Poland, Polish, 138, 240 Prakriti, Prakrti, 131, 209, 303, 327, 404 Pranavananda, Swami, 374–79, 409 Prasad, Brajeshwar, 227, 247, 404 Pratap, Rana, 187, 240, 297, 370 Pratapaditya, 187, 211, 296 Primogeniture, 135, 138–40 Prince of Wales, 19, 68, 75, 82, 84–85, 89, 128, 133, 200 Prithviraj, 196, 240 Protestant, 12, 16, 114, 135, 220 Providence, 66–67, 115, 120–23, 126–27, 144, 165 Economy of providence, 121–23 General providence, 123, 144 Special providence, 115, 123, 144 Pudukkottai, 111 Punjab, 86, 89, 147, 167, 207, 255, 294, 297, 332, 362, 370, 372 Purana, 76, 188, 252, 301 Purna Swaraj, 91 Purusha Sukta, 18, 376 Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, 58, 77, 79, 82–83, 163 Quran, 205, 358, 362–63, 365, 383 Rabha, 297 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 227, 235 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 86, 167 Raikat, Jagadindra Deb, 329 Rajabhakti, 75, 166, 170 Rajamala, 130–31, 133, 139, 300 Rajasthan, 147, 293, 355 Rajavamshi, 2–3, 21, 293, 299, 312–36, 376, 399, 402, 404, 410, 415, 418

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Index 433

Rajoguna, 220 Rajput, 26, 68, 108–09, 114, 131, 138, 164, 183, 185–86, 193, 195–98, 203, 293, 297, 299, 312, 372 Rajputisation, 292 Rama, 29, 88, 135, 165, 176, 184, 194, 209, 226, 255, 297, 325, 333–34, 352–54, 370–71, 381 Rama VII, 255 Ramakrishna, 114, 204, 372, 375, 380 Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Movement, 372, 375, 380 Ramarajya, 333, 352–54, 371, 381 Ramayana, 25, 226, 253 Ramdas, 170, 226 Ramnad, 74, 114 Ranade, Mahadev Govind, 141, 167, 173 Rashmani, 204 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 380 Ravana, 80, 352 Ray, Ramakanta, 168 Regicide, 188 Republicanism, Republican, 19, 27, 52, 124, 126, 144, 188, 223, 228, 238-39 Revenue maximisation, 15–16, 56–57, 92, 117, 129–30, 136, 143, 145, 335, 406 Rgveda, 18, 376 Risley, H. H., 299, 309, 312, 314 Rome, Roman, 16–17, 19, 23, 25–26, 55–56, 59, 60–62, 65–66, 69, 79–80, 122, 170, 175, 181–82, 184, 207, 214, 218, 227, 236–37, 258, 322, 351, 353, 362, 364, 371, 400, 402, 407, 417 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 211, 218, 230, 238, 248–49, 262, 410 Roy, Ananta, 1 Roy, D. L., 165, 183, 186, 194, 196, 234

Chandragupta, 194, 234 Mewar Patan, 186 Sita, 194 Tarabai, 183 Roy, M. N., 239, 363 Roy, Rammohun, 56, 121, 172, 177–78, 223 Rta, 236, 258, 262 Russia, Russian, 19, 51, 62, 67, 83, 166, 169, 210, 217 Russian Revolution, 260, 351–52, 370 Ryotwari Settlement, 57–58 Safavid, 27, 257–58 Saladin, 244, 259 Salic Law, 139–40 Samajpati, 169, 178–79, 242, 411 Samurai, 171 Sanskritisation, 291 Santal, 176, 371–72, 378 Santal, Jitu, 372 Santosh, Raja of, 75 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar, 189–91, 197, 240, 403 Sarvabhauma, 188, 191, 354 Satya Pir, 29 Saudi Arabia, 30, 261 Savarkar, V. D., 240, 243 Savitri, 203, 205–06 Scheduled Caste, 2, 290, 292–93, 315, 332 Scheduled Tribe, 290, 293 Schmitt, Carl, 15, 23, 27, 406 Scotland, Scottish, 12, 185–86 Scott, Walter, 185–86 Second World War, 173, 261, 302, 304, 381 Sen, Dinesh Chandra, 142

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Index

Sen, Kaliprasanna, 131, 300, 306

Sen, Keshub Chunder, 114–15, 118–28, 143–45, 178, 408 Sen, Nabinchandra, 82, 174–77, 267, 299, 411 Raivataka-Kurukshetra-Prabhas, 174–75 Serfdom, 26, 54 Seths, Jagat, 54

Shinto, Shintoism, 170, 172–73, 407

Shiva, 88, 182, 198, 297, 313–14, 323–24, 332, 334, 364, 366, 370–71, 375–79, 410 Shivaji, 112–13, 163, 170, 173–74, 181–82, 187, 192, 196, 210–11, 216, 226, 240, 297, 370, 380, 403

Shivaji Festival, 170, 177, 207, 210–11, 277, 410 Shivayan, 297, 313, 324

Shudra, 184, 219, 235, 291, 320, 371 Shunri, 297

Siam, Thailand, Siamese, Thai 30, 254–56, 323, 402, 405

Sikhism, Sikh, 27, 53, 55, 113, 147, 165, 177, 243, 372 Sinha, H. N., 233, 236, 403 Sirajuddaulah, 54, 187

Sita, 88, 194, 203, 206, 209, 322–23 Sitaram, 212, 296

Smith, Vincent, 71

Social Contract, 19, 178, 201, 211–12, 218, 224, 228–33, 248, 401, 403–04 Soraya, 205

South Africa, 169–70

Soviet Union, Soviet, 28, 234, 243–44, 248, 351, 363, 368 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 64 Sukarno, 254

Swadeshi, 84, 86, 163, 167, 171, 182, 210, 212–13, 352 Swaraj, Svaraj, 86, 89, 91, 190, 240, 352–56, 364, 366, 371, 418 Switzerland, Swiss, 27, 54

Tagore, Abanindranath, 186, 192, 196–98, 209 Rajkahini, 186, 198 Tagore, Debendranath, 121, 178

Tagore, Rabindranath, 85–86, 113, 130, 134–35, 137, 140–45, 164–65, 169, 172–73, 177–80, 198–201, 213, 222–23, 226, 241–43, 252–57, 259–60, 264, 372, 376, 380–81, 407, 409, 411, 413 Dakghar, 180 Kheya, 200 Mukuta, 134, 140, 365 Naivedya, 199 ‘Pratinidhi’, 226, 381 Prayashchitta, 199 Rajarshi, 134–35, 225 Raktakarabi, 242 ‘Svadeshi Samaj’, 140, 169, 178, 180 Tasher Desha, 243 Visarjana, 134, 137 Tagore, Sourindro Mohun, 74 Taluqdar, 74, 139

Tebhaga, 330, 381

Tennyson, Alfred, 63, 360

Thompson, Augustus Rivers, 127 Tibet, 116, 232

Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 86–87, 112, 163,167, 182, 210, 354, 403, 413 Tipu Shah, 225

Tipu Sultan, 56

Titles, 26, 59, 61–62, 64, 74, 82, 188, 191 Adhiraja, 62, 188 Malik, 61–62, 384

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Index

Malikeh, 61 Padshah, Padishah, 61–62, 302 Raja, 26, 33, 62–63, 74–75, 81, 85, 110, 117, 120, 127, 131, 133–36, 139–40, 165–66, 169, 171–72, 174, 184, 191, 193, 200, 225–26, 242, 253, 255, 292, 297, 308, 318, 321, 327, 365–67, 382, 413 Samrat, 18, 165, 188–89, 191, 244, 365 Shahinshah, 61–62 Sultan, 56, 61–62, 193, 195, 207, 351, 357, 359, 362 Titu Mir, 225 Tod, James, 109–10, 185–86 Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, 109 Tokyo Trial, 261–62, 404 Tripathi, Vishwambhar Dayal, 245–47, 404 Tripura, Hill Tippera(h), 7, 15, 108, 130–43, 145, 147, 204, 241, 293, 296, 298–312, 332, 336, 408–09 Tripur Kshatriya, 298–312, 409 Tripur Sangha, 306–07 Tulsidas, 227 Udayaditya, 211 Upadhyay, Brahmabandhab, 209 Upanishad, 176–77, 221 Uttar Khanda, 331–32 Vaishnava, Vaishnavism, 27, 172, 198, 208, 213, 222, 295, 303, 319, 322, 377

435

Vande Mataram, 255 Varna, 18, 289, 291–94, 298, 300, 326, 335–36, 376 Veda, Vedanta, Vedantic, 18, 87, 190, 211, 376 Viceregal Palace, New Delhi, 68, 73 Viceroy, 29, 61, 64–67, 70, 72–74, 76, 79, 87, 111, 122, 137, 140, 205, 230, 239, 316, 361, 371, 399, 409 Victoria, Victorian, 59–61, 67, 75–80, 82–83, 90, 115, 120, 125, 129, 178, 194, 201, 203, 358, 408, 416 Victoria Memorial Hall, 68, 84 Virashtami, 211 Virat, 18, 181, 208–09, 376–77, 379 Vishnu, Narayana, 25, 29, 75, 84, 88, 166, 176, 188, 222, 314, 322, 364, 367, 370–71, 377 Vivekananda, Swami, 79–80, 114, 135, 167, 182, 204, 219–21, 235, 296, 372, 375, 380, 407, 413 Voltaire, 54–55, 109 Weber, Max, 121, 177, 182, 409 Yazid, 184, 362 Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 58, 187 Zamindar, 57–58, 74–76, 80, 82, 84, 114, 132, 136–38, 178, 186, 204, 225, 245, 296–97, 315, 329, 356, 382–85 Zarathustra, 256–57 Zoroastrianism, Zoroastrian, 256, 353

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