Nation Games: History and Historiographical Imperatives in India 9783110659412, 9783110659047

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Benjamin Zachariah Nation Games

Benjamin Zachariah

Nation Games

History and Historiographical Imperatives in India

ISBN 978-3-11-065904-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-065941-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065957-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942019 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Debojit Thakur, depicting the rotten core of a lotus flower Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface Remember the war against Franco? That’s the kind where each of us belongs Though he may have won all the battles We had all the good songs. – Tom Lehrer, ‘The Folk Song Army’, That Was the Year That Was (1965)

1

Where We Are Now

It was in the winter of 1996, I think, in Delhi, that I heard Pete Seeger play at the Siri Fort auditorium. The audience was overwhelmingly from the Indian middle class, the kind now reviled by the new dispensation of fascists. It was clear that theirs was once the dream of a better world, a better country, and an internationalism of shared humanity. When the concert was over, the audience would not go away, and Pete Seeger was summoned by long applause and aching hands to reappear several times. He had not, in the course of a long and intense concert, sung ‘We Shall Overcome’, and the audience would not let him go until he had done so. The old man finally did sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, though to my mind, he no longer entirely believed the lyrics; it was left to us in the audience to do most of the singing. After we finally agreed to disperse, many of us bleary-eyed with sentimental tears, it occurred to me that despite the indisputable genuineness of the emotions, this was an exercise in selfindulgence and sentimentality in a nostalgic key. As I write this in 2020, twenty-three years and a bit later, I ask myself how many of those in that audience, with their ‘liberalisation’-era affluence and purchasing power, have made their peace with the fascists in India today? with daily reports of lynchings? do they believe they shall overcome something, someday? do they breathe a sigh of relief that many of them have Hindu and upper-caste names, and hope to hide in the majority till the crisis has passed, like the ‘Aryan’-identified in 1930s Germany? Could one, after the (apparently very democratic) seizure of power by the Indian fascist conglomerate that likes to be known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’, write the same sort of book about nationalism in India that one might have done before? In the second half of May 1996, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary ‘volunteer’ organization that was founded in the 1920s, had a brief sniff of power when it was invited to attempt to form a government at the centre; in those very few days, it was evident that they could not win a vote of confidence on the floor of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-202

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Parliament, but they spent their time well, planting various party stooges at various levels of bureaucracy and administration. Delhi’s collective consciousness noted this with a sigh of inevitability. From 1998 to 2004, a BJP-led coalition ran a government; but there was a prevailing sense that things could have been much worse; in 2004, when the coalition was voted out of office, a sense that ‘democracy’ had prevailed seized the public mood. The Congress government that governed for the next ten years was a pioneer of using the colonial-era sedition laws against Indian citizens – attempting ‘to excite disaffection’ towards ‘the Government established by law in India’1 – and although this disturbed many civil rights-minded persons (the penalty for sedition, rather disproportionately, is life imprisonment, potentially accompanied by a fine), the Delhi intelligentsia thought, on the whole, that though the government’s ‘excesses’ were somewhat regrettable, the country was in good hands, hands that could be trusted: they were those of ‘people like us’. These were the ‘lazy liberals’ referred to by a recent Magsaysay Award-winning journalist2; armed with the mantra that India was ‘the largest democracy in the world’, they could afford to be smug. And yes, some of them would have been among those singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with Pete Seeger, against Pete Seeger’s better judgement. When the BJP formed its second coalition government in 2014, many of the abuses of ‘democracy’ in the world’s largest country-that-had-been-grantedthe-epithet-‘democratic’ already had a long and respectable history: special legislation that suspended the rule of law; ‘emergency’ provisions signed by the executive; a tolerance of electoral rigging (the view was that in order to successfully rig an election, one needed to have strength on the ground, so it was somewhat democratic anyway). Various measures, including the terrifyingly-innocuously-labelled ‘Operation Green Hunt’, a military murder operation to be directed at ‘Naxalites’, ‘Maoists’, ‘terrorists’, had been justified in the name of ‘national interest’, and opponents of the state had already been labelled anti-national. The ‘encounter killing’ also had a respectable nonSanghi history. When the Sangh Parivar intensified these activities, there was nothing much that could be done. Of course, this was accompanied by an explicit targeting of Muslims in particular, and non-Hindus more generally, as outsiders and as anti-nationals; and a special targeting of Kashmir and of Kashmiris as lives of a lesser order. By the time the fascists seized parliamentary power for the second time in a row in elections widely regarded 1 Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code: see https://indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/2263? view_type=browse&sam_handle=123456789/1362 accessed 28.01.2020. 2 https://scroll.in/article/762857/the-ravish-kumar-interview-our-lazy-liberal-class-was-alwaysopportunistic, accessed 28.01.2020.

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as rigged, lynchings and rapes had more or less become official policy, in BJP-ruled states, and a few more besides. All of this was done in the name of an intensified claim to ‘nationalism’; and the demand from random gangs of Hindu men as well as from organized bands of RSS Stormtroopers is that their potential victim give in to the demand that they chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’, Victory to Lord Ram, which is by now used by the RSS as the Indian equivalent of the German SA’s (Sturmabteilung) insistence that everyone give the Hitler salute and shout Heil Hitler. At the time of writing, a new citizenship law and a register of citizens threatens to actualise the long-standing Sanghi ambition of marginalising Muslims; the protesters at the ensuing protests are holding their nerve against excessive state violence and selective murder.

Two Kashmiris discuss the future of India: Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and Sheikh Abdullah (1905–1982).

It should be made clear here that this discussion in a set of prefatory remarks is not an attempt at a comparative calculus of death and destruction; nor an attempt to assess the record of one set of political organisations in India against

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another. It is an attempt to describe briefly the forms taken by Indian nationalism in everyday life in very recent times. I shall not undertake to draw some kind of arbitrary line between good and better or bad and worse nationalisms. Since ‘nationalism’ in most of these cases is used as a normative without descriptive capacity, an act of description could, in an optimistic-Foucauldian manner, be seen as a destruction of its normative capacity: making the implicit assumptions of a ‘discourse’ explicit is said to weaken or disarm that discourse. But it makes more sense to be pessimistic under current conditions. The strength of international opinion is on the side of bigots, and the moral consensus is that of the lynch mob. The term ‘nationalism’ is fast becoming the plaything of fascists, everywhere in the world: to this extent, we have regrettably won the argument that framing histories in nationalist terms was dangerous; and we have probably understood that the defeat of nationalism is necessary not just nationally (that is, in India), but internationally (the terms ‘national’ and ‘international’ of course, referring as they do to states and not ‘nations’, reveal the hegemony of the nation idea). Reductio ad absurdum might have, in the hands or writing of professional historians, seemed merely a polemical attempt to locate nationalism on a continuum with fascism, but the fascists have done that for us, without irony or intended critique.

2

A Short History of the Text and its Outside

This book is concerned with histories of India that cannot be subsumed within an obligatory history of Indian nationalism; and it explores the consequences and productivities of alternative framings of histories of matters related to India. This is also an attempt to share the concerns and findings of historians of South Asia with a non-South Asianist readership who finds it tedious to engage with the minutiae of a complex and voluminous historiography that has become relentlessly self-referential; and to speak beyond the academic divide to an engaged audience of non-specialists. Since the theme of nationalism is crucial to public debates, live political conflict, the negotiation of everyday life, the exclusions and tyrannies of the state – this is not a comprehensive list – it is an evasion of responsibility on the part of professional scholars to nod knowingly at each other and smirk at the allegedly unenlightened or uninitiated whose assumptions have not caught up with theirs. If this is reduced to a Foucauldian observation on co-existing ‘regimes of truth’,3 the question remains as to whether

3 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 109–133.

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academic work can justify the luxury, not to mention the use of resources, of existing in and for itself; and whether academic sub-fields can justify claiming special status despite the presence of cognate debates and related problems which are possible to engage with. To engage in political debate is to attempt to intervene and thereby to transform political assumptions, the institutions that build upon them and the politics they support. Anticipated criticism of a book such as this should be expected on the following lines: either that people have already moved to writing non-nationalist histories, and therefore the book is redundant; or that the author is betraying the ‘legacy’ of Indian nationalism by questioning its ability to be inclusive and non-majoritarian. Both are desired criticisms: the first would help in delegitimising the default position of nationalism, because once historians have accepted that they don’t do nationalism any more, they cannot revert to it – but somehow, I don’t see that happening in the near future. The second, though epistemologically less satisfying, would at least link up with a growing critique of the over-centralized, and also often violent, Indian state. There is still a tendency, despite the widespread acknowledgement of the arbitrariness, accidentalness and artificiality of ‘nations’, to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and/or reasonable basis upon which to organise the world, even among academics and intellectuals whose own work goes a long way towards destabilising the alleged naturalness of the ‘nation’. A few years ago, we appeared to have briefly reached the moment when (as in all situations in which you appear to have won the argument) everyone agrees with you, and you in turn generously agree that they had agreed with you all along – all you were doing was to complete, and make consistent, what others had begun long ago. This assumption that ‘our’ side was winning the argument was based on talking mostly to people who were already on ‘our’ side: critical intellectuals, scholars, and activists who were gradually coming to the conclusion that a reliance on being on the side of a ‘good’, inclusive nationalism was nonetheless to be complicit in some form of nationalist exclusion and potentially statist violence. But even at the time, such optimism was misplaced. Now, as more and more shrill and aggressive forms of nationalism, or claims to custodianship of the national, dominate the public domain, everything must be judged by its conformity to some pre-defined or undefined set of national values, the epithet ‘anti-national’ is thrown about a lot, and many on ‘our’ side wish to return to the safety of the right side of nationalism, even if they know it to be an empty signifier, or a normative category without descriptive capacity. Admittedly, one of the central reasons for this lies in the fascist turn in Indian politics: a government run from behind by paramilitary gangs in monkey suits or khaki shorts

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(even if they pretend to grow up and graduate to trousers) has been able to insist that anyone who doesn’t share their brand of Hindu nationalism is ‘antinational’. It is tragicomic, though, to watch serious thinkers fall over each other to proclaim themselves the true nationalists and to denounce the Hindutvavadis as the traitors to the true ‘nation’; and it is folly on the part of the country’s citizens to protest their national loyalties: that would merely be to play the current fascist regime’s game. That game has now been internationalised, as scholars and activists of Indian origin abroad who will not subscribe to a Hindutva view of Indian nationalism are targeted by internet trolls and physically stalked by violent criminals in the pay of the Sangh Parivar, and Hindu donor organisations leaning on a combination of the poverty of US public universities, American nostalgia for the Indophilia of the 1960s, right-wing Christian groups’ support for ‘faith-based learning’, and postcolonial scholarship’s promotion of an identitarian agenda, seek to fund university posts that will promote a Hindu view of India, or to rewrite textbooks in California to imply that ‘Hindus’ are an undifferentiated category, an ancient civilization, and synomymous with ‘Indians’, as their fraternity has been able to do at ‘home’ in India. The connections and complicity of scholarship and politics must be opened up to scrutiny here; for it is clear that we are not, in this context, talking about a separation of academic and political spheres of communication. Books are banned or sought to be banned invoking the need not to offend national sentiment, the ‘national’ in each case being inflected slightly differently, regionally or otherwise: Shivaji could not be subject to criticism as a historical figure4; Gandhi cannot have been a homosexual (although there is apparently no discomfort at his having been a racist).5 The list could be extended or supplemented with a list of identitarian invocations of the need not to offend local, religious, caste, or gender sentiment – all of which make special claims to inclusion in a national narrative, in which one or other form of ‘culture’ or indigenous behaviour pattern is invoked. The continuum of conservatism in community-family-culture-nation formations is in the ascendant. The increasingly isolationist and exceptionalist mood of writing about India that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, which had the effect of confiscating from

4 On the banning by the Maharashtra government of and controversy surrounding the book by James Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), see Christian Lee Novetzke, ‘The Laine Controversy and the Study of Hinduism’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 8, 1–3 (2004), pp. 183–201. 5 Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011). It made international news: see for instance http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/ books/gandhi-biography-by-joseph-lelyveld-roils-india.html#, accessed on 28.01.2020.

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scholars working on India the insights available from studies conducted in and on other parts of the world, has a direct bearing on this phenomenon. This selfdenying and instrumentally myopic vision, often in the name of the disavowal of the hegemony of the ‘Western’, was illogically enough extended implicitly by many historians to cover scholarship on much of the rest of the world as well. The historiography of India proceeds in nationalist goose-step, non-Indian historians of India are cautious not to offend Indian nationalist sentiment, and many writers exercise rigorous self-censorship lest they fall foul of either law or vigilante group that can invoke the force of national sentiment against them. Versions of the core chapters of this book were formulated over a period from 2004 to 2015, when the concerns of a left-leaning historian such as I were to address my ‘discipline’ and my ‘area’ directly, because the question was why so many of us were framing our arguments in terms of a nationalism that didn’t fit our material, and were thereby legitimating one or other form of national belonging. This felt like a form of collective self-censorship that tended to ensure that all history-writing about India was Indian nationalist history-writing. That this problem did not fade away quietly is evident: one prominent historian who warned against nationalist frames was unable to avoid it himself, rewriting a nationalist textbook in terms of what one of his colleagues might have called ‘fragments’ of the nation6 – thereby illustrating the difficulties of escape even as the need for what had become reviled as ‘metanarrative’ became urgent again when we were still ‘decentring’ that which no longer had a centre. All the original articles have been revised, some several times over, and some more than others, but I have resisted the temptation to rewrite them entirely to reflect more precisely what I would now think; in some cases, later work of my own on similar or related themes expresses some of the ideas better. However, in most places I have restricted myself to adding a few newer references to statements that would appear more time-bound had they continued only to contain the earlier references; and to remove or revise statements that were bound inexorably to the times at which the essays were first written. The ‘project’, if there was indeed an explicit one, of the earlier interventions is however still extremely important to me, and I hope to more people. The current book supersedes, but also contains, an earlier one, Playing the Nation Game.7

6 Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002); Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s-1950s: Environment, Economy, Culture (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2014); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7 Benjamin Zachariah, Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011; 2nd edn. 2016).

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I have become aware that this was a somewhat facetious title apt for a more innocent time; in a time of neo-fascist dominance and violence, the game is altogether more ominous. It became clear to me that we were here talking as much about constructions of legitimation around the category of nationalism as we were about the Indian state, its formative period, and its forms of violence; and that the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’ obfuscated our ability to see the state, lending it a spurious legitimacy based on conceding to it the idea of popular sovereignty. For a while, (partially) critical voices advocated versions of nationalism that they were willing to support as less exclusionary than some other versions. Now, the silence of historians, intellectuals, the press, ‘civil society’ or anyone else in the Indian public domain on matters that might lead to them being labelled ‘antinational’ is extremely disturbing, especially as the new fascist dispensation of the Indian state claims their compulsory loyalty in ever-more authoritarian ways. That the state is considered to be, in Max Weber’s famous definition, ‘the legitimate monopoly of violence’ (and Weber was a conservative and an imperialist, so none of this was implied critique) is by now well-known and widely accepted. That the state is supposed to use that monopoly of violence to protect its citizens, who have allegedly entered into a ‘social contract’ with the sovereign power that wields that monopoly, is now the basis of most states’ claims to legitimacy. Alongside the question of monopolies of violence lies the question of hegemony (part coercion, part consent) and the question of what happens when that monopoly is threatened. Does the state exercise more coercion in the hope of manufacturing consent, and with that coercion does the consent become more and more illusory? Along with these questions are those related to exceptional situations and exceptional spaces. The Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, increasingly invoked nowadays on both the left and the right, observed that ‘sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception’; with this as starting-point, the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben went on to suggest that the ultimate modern form of creating spaces of exception is the concentration camp; and every modern state is at least potentially the concentration camp, where the whims of its guards (subcontracted state violence?) and not any identifiable norm become the rule.8 Here, of course, the ability of the colonial state in India and its successor state to create exceptional situations, emergencies, and unlawful agencies that wield state power or state-like power can

8 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) [1995]; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) [2003]; after Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).

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be pointed to: vigilante groups promoted by states, but also military and paramilitary rule in areas where the ordinary rights of citizens are suspended (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958 being the most obvious case).9 It might have earlier been said that more than one entity wields violent power in India, which gives rise to oligopolies of violence rather than a state monopoly of violence. Now that the longest-standing fascist paramilitary movement in the world is in power, providing the country with the President, the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, most members of central and state governments, irregularly and regularly appointed public servants and press secretaries, judges, university vice chancellors, and almost everybody of any importance, the Gleichschaltung is nearly complete. The exceptionalism of the postcolonial moment has assisted this in great measure: statements that relate to ‘India’ must conform to ‘indigenous’ norms and frameworks; and until very recently, the claim by some dissenting historians, journalists or public figures that India was institutionalising a form of fascism10 was met by the counter-claim that fascism was a ‘European’ or ‘Eurocentric’ concept that did not apply to India – and this was among many who explicitly claimed not to be Hindutva supporters. In this environment, claiming a space within Indian ‘nationalism’ becomes a safer space to speak from; and the rules of the game require that every intervention starts with the shibboleth of nationalism. But it has the effect of isolating ‘India’ from scholarly or informed debate, and of separating ‘India’ from the debates of the rest of the world – in which it properly belongs, because India is a part of the story of (and in some respects the pioneer of) the rightward drift of world politics in the last few decades.

3

How Personal is the Political?

Eric Hobsbawm wrote several years ago that a serious student of nationalism could ill afford to be a nationalist oneself.11 And indeed, this is what ‘progressive’

9 http://nagapol.gov.in/PDF/The%20Armed%20Forces%20Special%20Powers%20Act% 201958.pdf, accessed 21.08.2019, and for the version of the Act as applies to the (former?) State of Jammu and Kashmir, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2013/11/08/ Armed%20Forces.pdf, accessed 28.01.2020. 10 Jairus Banaji (ed), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2013); Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a nonEurocentric understanding of fascism’, Transcultural Studies (December 2014), pp. 63–100. 11 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp 12–13.

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intellectuals have been claiming for some time now: that they are not partisans for any particular nationalism, least of all their own – the paradox of a rejection of an imposed and obligatory identity that nevertheless, in being disavowed, reiterates and underlines that identity. A ‘national liberation movement’, in particular, must have a ‘nation’ to liberate. But if the object of liberation must itself be disciplined to be a stable category, does this disciplining into nationhood not produce its own forms of oppression, or indeed reproduce the forms of oppression it claims to combat?12 Perhaps this returns us to a recurrent problem of our political vocabulary: that of normative categories without descriptive content. The ‘nation’ is one such category: compulsory belonging is enforced by the normative positive that simply is; we have difficulty describing, far less defining, that ‘nation’, even when we feel we belong. And if we don’t, rather like the children who felt the presence of the devil in Arthur Miller’s telling of the Salem/McCarthy witchhunts, we feel we ought to, and eventually we do.13 This book is, then, also a record of the intersection of personal and collective political and intellectual journeys. Our generation – I limit my reflections somewhat in terms of experiences of which I can personally speak here, and I was born in 1972, but I do not intend to imply that the experience is necessarily specific to a particular generation – all learned our nationalism young. We were not the first post-independence generation, but the second, and we took formal political freedom for granted; but we were taught the rituals and loyalties of national belonging very early. We could sing the national anthem (we knew the words); we even stood up when it was played, or if we did not do so, we did not always know why we felt at least mildly embarrassed; and we were expected, rather painfully, to turn up at our schools or sports clubs in the early hours of the morning to hoist the national flag on Independence Day and Republic Day, which meant that the joys of sleeping late on a holiday were lost. If some of us grew away from a celebration, or at least an unquestioning acceptance of Indian nationalism, and towards more critical perspectives, this

12 There are parallels to this argument in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), with reference to which the comments on p 9 are particularly relevant. But I don’t intend to make the strong argument that a definition is an act of oppression in and of itself; it is, in the end, a potentially conservative argument to take the limitations of certain forms of liberation movement as grounds for their condemnation. Instead, it might make sense to ground such statements in histories of the interests (both in an instrumental and more abstract, intellectual history, sense) and limitations of the national claims actually made in the times and places under consideration. 13 Arthur Miller, The Crucible (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) [1953], Act III, pp 101–105.

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was however less due to these irritations and more due to the political and social events and circumstances of our times, which taught us to divide Indian from Indian and ask questions that had not been possible to ask before. We all began, of course, as Nehruvian nationalists. This was the default position, and it was the obligatory and the only plausible position for those of us who came from ‘minorities’ within the Indian political entity, or in my case, of so convoluted and mixed an origin that the concept of ‘ethnicity’, that favourite of some theorists of nationalism and of ‘equal opportunities’ forms which preserve your details as a meaningless statistic, descends into parody when used to describe mine: the mixed genealogy of a complicated family that includes Syrian Muslim, Arab Jewish, Brahmo Samaj and Barendra Brahmin, if one merely looks at the preceding two generations and excludes a Pakistani branch of the family that is not Muslim. One advantage of nationalism is that it can at best smooth out or average these complications; and the Nehruvian version seemed to enable this.14 We were then, in the 1970s, not very concerned with the Hindutva-vs-‘good’Nehruvian-nationalism arguments that became so prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. The Nehruvian formulation – India as a composite and rich culture going back several thousand years, with many contributors adding successive and creative layers to it, disrupted by the British who insisted on remaining foreign and exploiting the country for outsiders’ profit – was taken for granted. More to the point, it was Muslim exceptionalism that was occasionally mentioned as disruptive of the ‘secular’ fabric of Indian nationalism. But the outsiders that nationalisms need were provided for us in various other contexts. University life, at Presidency College in Calcutta, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, was intellectually exhilarating at the same time as being strangely beset by aggressions that can at best be seen as the seamier side of anti-colonial nationalism translated into anxieties and neuroses. Apasanskriti (‘distorted culture’, though translated by some of us as entartete Kunst, ‘degenerate art’ in the Nazi sense of the term) and foreign devils seemed to be rolled into one as that catchphrase took in smoking ganja (marijuana), listening to ‘western music’, and other forms of being involved in alien activity. (The counter-claim, that ganja was part of the ‘indigenous’ fabric of Indian everyday life, was often made in jest by smokers on the canteen roof, who had no intention of sitting naked covered in ashes on the banks of the Ganga and passing the chillum among the Saivas). The polemic about apasanskriti, made not least by the representatives of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), took in some of the spirit of really existing debates in the public

14 See Chapter Five.

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domain. In the 1980s, the (Congress party’s) Union Health Minister specifically linked the threat of AIDS with foreigners, saying that India would not have a problem with the disease if the government banned Indians from having sex with non-Indians.15 A member of the CPI(M) described homosexuality, in no less a journal than the Economic and Political Weekly, as a Western and petty bourgeois vice.16 (The theme of sexual anxiety is one that has been explored for colonisers in their relations with the colonised; the colonised’s own anxieties have not been adequately examined in this regard.)17 The events after 6 December 1992, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the emergence of the Hindutva brigade to centre-stage finally ended the period of jokes about monkey suits and havildar shorts: the Sangh Parivar had moved from the ridiculous to the sinister. And there were people who had seemed sane just a single event earlier who now rejoiced that ‘they’ (the Muslims, collectively) had been ‘taught a lesson’. This disruption of the shibboleths of ‘secular nationalism’ is a collective trauma that has not been forgotten or worked through by many. In my own case, these experiences that led to the questioning of the form and content of Indian nationalism were supplemented by my experiences outside my country of origin, where, like all good ‘internationalists’, I became involved in the political movements of the times: for instance the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI),18 which sought to explain to people that more had been killed by sanctions than had died in the first Gulf War, and to build up opposition both to sanctions and to the regular bombing of Iraq (which, lest we now forget, continued throughout the inter-(Gulf)-war period). In a number of political interventions from the 1990s into the first decades of the new century, forms of nationalism and of expectations of nationalism that were at the very least problematic were displayed in the course of various

15 I am told that in Britain as well, this was the case: advice was given to people that they should not sleep with Americans. 16 H Srikanth, ‘Natural is not always rational’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31, 15 (April 13, 1996), pp 975–6; H Srikanth, ‘Marxism, Radical Feminism and Homosexuality’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32, 44/45 (November 8–14, 1997), pp 2900–04. 17 For instance, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980); later, Robert JC Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); but see several passages in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) [1961] for the beginnings of an exploration of that theme for the colonised. 18 http://www.casi.org.uk/ is the website that was maintained by the organisation until 2003, and survives as an archive. See also its successor site, http://www.iraqanalysis.org/ which was maintained until 2008, and also survives as an archive. Both sites last accessed 28.01.2020.

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political struggles: the CASI campaign was once besieged by a journalist who demanded to know of one of our Iranian members why he was joining a campaign in support of his ‘enemy’, Iraq. By 1999, we (the collective ‘we’ here evokes a unity among ‘progressives’ that doesn’t, of course, exist) were protesting against NATO’s 50th anniversary celebrations in Yugoslavia, and the bombing of Belgrade; we found ourselves at the same demonstration as Serb nationalists, while those who were for the ‘humanitarian intervention’ responded with the claim to defend the ‘national’ rights of the Kosovo Albanians. A couple of years down the line, in the aftermath of the twin towers, as we were protesting the bombing of Afghanistan,19 and thereafter, with a sense of déjà vu, of Iraq, we found ourselves at the same demonstrations as, inter alia, Muslim clerics and fundamentalists, Arab nationalists of various description, as well as consistent antiwar and pacifist activists like the Quakers. Some of us admitted to unease at this joining of unlikely allies from left and right; but coalitions cannot be choosy about their allies’ political views, and you cannot turn contingents away from a demonstration with any pretence of ‘democracy’. In some cases that unforgivable sin of European politics, anti-Semitism (by which of course is meant anti-Jewish feeling, to add to terminological confusion), was very difficult to separate from the anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism that was on display, and the problem was compounded by the source of this antiSemitism being the oppressed themselves: some Muslim groups rather than the usual suspects on the European right. ‘Democratic’ sentiment (that difficult and un-theorised position of an ‘average public conscience’) was squeezed by the conundrum of being forced to tolerate intolerance in the name of ‘liberalism’, and surrender progressive principles in the name of diversity and ‘culture’. Meanwhile, anti-Americanism and Arab nationalism and solidarity with ‘Islam’ began to merge; at any rate the cement that held it all together, anti-Americanism, became the socialism of the fools, to paraphrase the well-known remark about anti-Semitism.20 One day in 2003, shortly after the ‘historic’ February demonstrations across the world that were expressions of an organised anti-war coalition, I found

19 See my article on ‘collateral damage’ for the Hindustan Times, November 6, 2001, now archived at various websites, including http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/sixties-l/ 3836.html accessed 28.01.2020. The original link, http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/ 061101/detpla01.asp, is no longer live. 20 Attributed to August Bebel; in Karl Kautsky, ‘Hitlerism and Social Democracy’ (1934), he says of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, ‘Fifty years ago this was the program[me] of the antisemites. The Democrat Kronawetter called it “the socialism of the fools of Vienna.”‘ http:// www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/hitler/index.htm accessed 28.01.2020.

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myself sharing a platform at a university student-organised anti-war meeting at Sheffield University with a Labour MP from ‘Old Labour’, Jeremy Corbyn. I explained why I thought ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had nothing to do with the war that was about to take place; Corbyn said there would be no war, and that Old Labour would stop it. This episode underlined the difficulty of getting people in Britain to protest directly against their own Prime Minister and their own government, rather than absolving themselves in nationalist rhetoric about the need for British independence from the USA. It was often difficult to make reasoned arguments in an anti-imperialist mode about American or British foreign policy; a populist nationalism and/or solidarity with ‘national liberation movements’ took over the public domain all too easily, the oppressor and oppressed both being identified by nationality, an assumed solidarity with his/her ‘nation’ being taken for granted. As the anti-war movement of 2003 recedes into the distant past, ‘solidarity’ has largely been replaced by ‘identity’, and social media occupies the position the street once took, even this botched moment appears in retrospect to have been one of considerable hope; but the coalition of ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-war’ politics with identitarian mobilisation that was a feature of that movement has proved to be deeply damaging. It does not take a philosopher to discover within all of this that nationalism takes the place here of a meaningful debate about political principles and practices, and in so doing colonises the space that non-sectarian or internationalist politics could once have occupied. There is a long history of leftist compromises with or instrumentalised uses of nationalism that enable this confusion of someone’s nationalism with a principled leftist politics: ‘national liberation movements’, axiomatically, were to be assisted in defeating imperialism before ‘socialism’ could be achieved. In terms of popular appeal, the national principle was an easier mobilisational tool than internationalism or proletarian solidarity or socialism. But this entanglement with nationalism was not followed by disentanglement. On the contrary, a metanarrative of nationalism permeated ‘really existing socialism’, Third-World-ism, developmentalism, ‘liberalism’ of a political variety (as opposed to economic liberalism, which is not liberal at all), and a variety of well-meaning, if sometimes woolly, ‘progressive’ political movements.21

21 This can easily be a caricature of a long and agonised debate in socialist circles: it was not attachment to any particular concept of India/Hindustan that informed British communists’ support for Indian independence, nor a romantic celebration of Eire that informed British socialists’ support for a defeat of British forces in Ulster. However, these are examples of internationalist solidarities; and an Indian Communist Party’s support for Indian nationalism can be more difficult to disentangle from a nationalist position with the stress on the ‘national’ part of ‘national liberation’ than one on the ‘liberation’ part.

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Historians, of course, have for some time been told to avoid ‘metanarratives’ because they impose a spurious coherence to that which is fragmentary.22 And yet I have never met a narrative that does not have a corresponding metanarrative, which hides itself from us as an implicit disciplining discourse: there is a metanarrative that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. To avoid making it explicit to and for ourselves is to hide from ourselves the wider context within which we place our thinking, and to leave it to the critic or the future researcher to unearth aspects of it. In this age of subjectivities, and of potential solipsism, all we can provide is a tale with the obligatory caveats: ‘as I understand it’ and ‘as I invite you to understand it with me’. Do historians really avoid metanarratives? Is it possible to do so? We might, indeed, with the fragments we invoke, merely (re)invent new/recycled/implicit metanarratives, which are themselves fragments of other metanarratives. Or we may allow our fragments to drag us unwittingly into the building of others’ metanarratives. This may be completely obvious; but as historians struggle to disentangle the insights from the shibboleths of the ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postmodern’, a call to make explicit one’s background and concerns might be a more productive way of writing history than all the warnings about why we cannot write history. The intellectual and historical autobiography of the historian, which lies implicit in many projects, can be made explicit, not in order to turn the exercise into the personalised and solipsist narrative of an author who seeks to avoid the obligatory death s/he is alleged to have encountered, but to enable a reader to situate the arguments provided in this book in a context, and decide how to sift the merely subjective from the intersubjective.23 22 History is, following a Hayden White argument, a literary genre that imposes its conventions on its unwary readers and sometimes its writers; truth-claims are thus integral to the genre of history-writing: Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1987); Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1–33. For a useful critique, see A Dirk Moses, ‘Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism and the Public Role of History’, History and Theory 44 (October 2005), pp. 311–332. On ‘fragments’ in the Indian context see Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defence of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, Representations (Winter 1992) 37, pp 27–55; and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments. 23 Before you study history, study the historian, as EH Carr famously put it: EH Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [1961]; only, he might have added, the historian’s own duty of self-criticism and self-observation has simultaneously to be in operation. In this connection, see Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978], Preface; he himself takes it, he says, from Antonio Gramsci.

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There is also a wider world to consider: everyone has some way of relating to the past, and to memories of the past.24 Public expectations of history, as opposed to those of professionals, tend to revolve around ‘the truth’. Historians are cast as ‘experts’ who can tell the ‘truth’; only, in a buyer’s market, those historians who tell the most palatable alleged ‘truths’ are those whose ‘truths’ are accepted. Others are ‘biased’. Since historians have claimed some special custody of a privileged way of seeing the past, and indeed in some readings are themselves sites of collective memory,25 it is also the duty of a ‘profession’ to convey to a ‘public’ that ‘experts’ are not those who possess ‘truth’ but those who attempt to impose upon themselves certain standards of debating ‘evidence’: standards that can, and must themselves be interrogated, as well as simultaneously shared with and communicated to a wider public. But this is a more difficult question in a profession and a world which is not only epistemologically skeptical about truth-claims, but is also increasingly unable to identify a deliberate lie.

24 For a critical survey of the literature on collective memory, see Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, vol. 41, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 179–197. On the tension between history and memory, see for instance Jay Winter, Remembering War: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century (London: Yale University Press, 2006). See also, for a warning against the overvalorisation of memory and its potential oppositional status to history, Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, No. 69, Special Issue: Grounds for Remembering (Winter, 2000), pp. 127–150; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and the People without History’, History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 4. (Dec., 1995), pp. 275–298. 25 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24.

Contents Preface

V

Introduction 1 1 Nationalism as Legitimation 6 2 Identities and their Discontents 9 3 The Historiographical Problem: Residual Nationalism 4 Anticolonialism, Nationalism, Communalism 17 5 Ways Out or Ways Back In? 25

12

Chapter 1 Historiography 31 1 Imaginings, Inventions, Intuitions: Thinking about Nationalism Since the 1980s 33 2 Bringing it All Back ‘Home’ 39 3 The International Dimensions of Insularity 43 4 The Late Subalternist and the Politics of Representation 51 5 Pleading Exceptionalism: Anticolonial Nationalisms, Liberation and the Precariousness of the Indigenous 56 Slight Conclusions 64 Chapter 2 (Meta)narrative 65 1 The ‘Nationalist Movement’ 65 2 The Problem Of ‘Authenticity’ or the Search for the ‘Indigenous’ 69 3 Twentieth Century Colonial Politics and the Problem of the Masses 73 Conclusions: What is Missing In This Picture? 89 Chapter 3 Hurreebabu and the Royal Society 93 1 Social and Intellectual Milieux 95 2 The Comparative Framework: ‘Nationalism’ 98 3 The Comparative Framework: ‘Progress’ and the Colonisers 103 4 Historical Models 107 5 The Histories: Writings 110 Conclusions: Hurreebabu and the Royal Society 118

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Chapter 4 National Hinduism 121 1 The Argument 124 2 British Discoveries, Native Informants: Manoeuvres, Reifications, Reiterations, Modifications and Reappropriations 133 3 The Return of the Native: Romantic Anticapitalism, Eastern Spirituality and Aryanism 140 4 The ‘Hindu’ as ‘National’: A Lingering on a Well-Known Argument 151 5 The Numbers Game 154 Some Conclusions: Fascisms, Nationalisms 158 Chapter 5 The Nehruvian and the Developmental 161 1 ‘Nehruvian’ Nationalism and the Developmental Imagination 166 2 The Communist Counter-Manoeuvre 174 3 The Exclusions of the Developmental; the (Partial) Suppression of the ‘Cultural’ 179 4 Internationalism, Non-alignment and the the Erosion of the Nehruvian 191 Conclusions: The Myth of the Benign State 194 Chapter 6 The Volk and Fascism 199 1 Fascism as Analytic and as Movement 203 2 Volk and Authenticity: The Indigenist Imperative in Comparative Perspective 209 3 Leading the ‘Folk Element’ 217 4 Akhand Bharat and ‘Greater India’ 220 Some Conclusions 222 Conclusions

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231

Introduction ‘Nation’ and ‘nationalism’ made their appearance in Indian political discussions in the English language between the sixth and eighth decades of the nineteenth century, gradually replacing their commonly-used predecessor term‚ ‘native’.1 The legitimating potential of claiming to be a ‘nation’ was not lost on an Indian political elite that was linked in to European and British, and with time North American, public debates, political theory and history. Initially the basis of a claim to a greater share in ‘representative government’, a ‘national’ claim came with time to justify a claim to popular sovereignty and eventual statehood for India. The central oppositional category against which the ‘nation’ was defined was ‘alien rule’ or ‘colonial rule’, although attempts to harmonise an Indian nationalism with a qualified belonging to a wider British imperial polity were also present in the language of Indian political discussions. It is important to distinguish between the words used in political language as intended legitimation, and the ideas they refer to. The question of translatability enters into the equation: Indian languages did not have equivalents that were readily adaptable to the new expression of collective identity that were far less flexible than the ones they knew, and indeed in some cases sought to impose collective belonging to the ‘nation’, than existing vocabulary allowed for. Pre-existing words referred more to ‘fuzzy’ than to ‘enumerated’ communities,2 and depending on the audience addressed, qaum, jati, rashtra etc, were used as imperfect translations that had to be naturalised, but continued to bear the connotations of their older and other usages alongside the newer ones. The ‘nation’ was largely imagined, debated and theorised in English, even when written about in Indian languages: writers’ self-conscious referring back to English, or to other European languages via English, remains evident in most cases. A standardisation of translational practices for words in the state’s vocabulary had to await national independence. ‘Nationalism’ also remained a concern of an emerging all-India middle class that sought to control the economic and social spaces of the state-to-be. Among this emerging middle class, sub-groups competing for dominance in this

1 See Benjamin Zachariah, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2019), p. 74, on Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, retrospectively and probably unjustly appropriated as the founder of a ‘two-nations’ theory and the idea of ‘Pakistan’, and his use of the term ‘native’. 2 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (ed), Subaltern Studies VII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-001

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Introduction

anticipated state also contested the parameters and boundaries of belonging to the nation, attempting to exclude those they sought to disempower in an eventual state. At the same time, academic writing on an Indian ‘nation’ (which was itself part of the nationalist movement), sought to buttress claims to independence and statehood, as well as to produce various versions of a nationhood, projected into the past as well as the future, serviceable for a new state. ‘Nationalism’ was used to refer to a loyalty to India as a whole, used in opposition to ‘communalism’, sectional or sectarian loyalty to a usually religious identity that was less than ‘national’. ‘Communal’ was seldom used as self-description, and more as attempted delegitimation. The early years of the invocation of nationalism in the service of anticolonial politics were based on defining the practical, spatial and cultural parameters of a ‘nation’, and watching the struggles for national unification in Italy and Germany. What should a nation do: build up its economic strength through protection of infant industries through tariffs (Friedrich List);3 or find its soul (Giuseppe Mazzini)?4 By the late nineteenth century, the word ‘national’ was used to describe organisations, as part of their names (the Indian National Conference, the Indian National Congress), and the idea of ‘national awakening’ was widely discussed by intellectuals. The need for ‘national’ industries and ‘national’ education had begun to be institutionalised by the turn of the century, and found a focal point in the campaign against the Partition of Bengal from 1905.5 Widely referred to as Swadeshi, which translates as ‘of our own country’, this is the closest word in Indian languages that came to connote the ‘national’, though the desh in question (which could also mean village, place of birth, or locality) was not clearly defined. Swaraj, self-rule or independence, avoided the question of the collective self, contained in the prefix swa, that was to be the nation.6 The principle of ‘national self-determination’ was not, however, acknowledged as the central guiding principle of an emerging international state system until after the First World War, when the Bolshevik revolutionaries, Lenin and Trotsky, proclaimed it as a principle, and the US President, Woodrow Wilson

3 Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966). 4 Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 5 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973); PC Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, 1932). 6 See M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1938) [1909].

Introduction

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could offer no less in his principles for remodelling the world after the war.7 At this point, what had been in the nineteenth century a radical innovation in thinking about states and sovereignty became tamed by its official anointment. The divergence between the principle and the practice remained stark. The formula of ‘trusteeship’ that the League of Nations (and the United Nations thereafter) adopted to deal with not-yet-nations was a reminder that the criteria of nationhood were in the custody of outsiders with a coercive power that relied on more than concepts. But ‘national’ in India still invoked the collective that was yet to be. From the 1920s, imperial administrators as well as native intellectuals and academics spoke of ‘nation-building’, following the official British rhetoric of impending self-rule in ‘nations ripe for self-government’. The question of who belonged and who did not to an entity called ‘India’ became urgent in connection with British claims that divergent and antagonistic ‘communities’ could not be considered a ‘nation’ and against the backdrop of ‘communal’ tensions between Hindus and Muslims in particular. ‘Nationalism’ thus invoked ‘race’, civilisation, and often the religious community alongside the sense of belonging to a future nation-state. It also mobilised European debates on Aryanism and eugenics in search of the healthy national body.8 The tautological nature of national claims – that the nation and state must be congruent, therefore the state-to-be must be defined in terms of the nation that justifies it – were reasonably obvious. International discourse on what a nation is and should be – the standard of legitimation for the staking of claims to territorial sovereignty – conspired with the idea of the one-nation-one-state model that was promoted. Definitions came with contestations, and varieties of ‘Indian nation’ had various ethnic and religious inflections. The normative importance of the national notwithstanding, it was descriptively vague. The national unit being sought was in turn Bengali (Hindu, upper caste and male), Marathi (also usually Hindu, upper-caste and male), Muslim (ashraf, North Indian, Urdu-speaking), Bengali Muslim, etc, with sectional or regional ideas of the ‘nation’ simply projected onto the rest of India. The search for the ‘essence of the nation’ and its ‘national genius’ lent itself easily to organicist ideas of the ancient-and-modern nation that must be purged of its ‘impurities’ to realise itself once again. In such

7 Arno Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917–1918, New Haven, 1963 [1959]. 8 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 242–252.

4

Introduction

arguments, the ‘Hindu’ past was to be the ‘Hindu’ future, and since Muslims in particular and other ‘minorities’ in general had their loyalties and sacred imagination tied to other places, only ‘Hindus’ could be true nationals.9 In some arguments, ‘Hindu’ was a somewhat confused but nevertheless crucial category: geographical, cultural, religious, ancient civilisation, sacred soil and earth, birth, culture and way of life all at the same time. A struggle by outcastes excluded from Hindu normative hierarchies and by Muslims not to be included in such definitions of national belonging led logically enough to counter-claims to their being different ‘nations’ and therefore promoting different nationalisms. By the 1920s the theory of the ‘Aryan invasion’ of India was used by some to argue that Hindu upper castes were foreigners to the nation,10 and by the 1940s some Muslim leaders sought to organise around the idea that South Asian Muslims were not a ‘minority’ but a separate and distinct ‘nation’.11 The version of nationalism that the new Indian state adopted after independence and partition was, however, a broad and inclusive one, invoking a cultural continuity with the past that went beyond sectarianism. Articulated by the left wing of a nationalist movement that saw the end of imperialist rule as an interim goal on the road to socialism, it regarded nationalism as obsolete at its very moment of realisation.12 It relied, however, on asserting an Indian nationalism rather than describing it, and on asserting a collective goal for the ‘nation’, now identified with the state, in ‘development’.13 As ‘nationalism’, seen as a ‘composite culture’ of belonging in which all persons within the borders of the state could (and ought to) participate, became the language of political legitimation, exclusions from national belonging on the grounds of more sectarian definitions of the nation were difficult to articulate legitimately in public. Such a ‘nationalism’ was so inclusive as to be unusable to distinguish citizens of India from citizens of other countries – which is precisely what made it so attractive in a state with so diverse a population, in which any discussion on

9 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1928); M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1938). 10 Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 11 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 12 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Signet, 1946). 13 Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Indian State, Nehruvian (Anti-)Nationalism and the Question of Belonging’, Contemporary Perspectives Vol. 3, No.2, 2009, pp. 181–204; see also Chapter Five in this volume.

Introduction

5

national belonging would lead to making explicit the actual or potential exclusions that any nationalism must have. Forms of exclusion were now more implicit than explicit, with nonetheless serious practical implications. Indeed, forcible inclusion, as in the case of parts of the north-east of India,14 or Kashmir, more or less so at different points in its post-1947 history, was often more of a contentious issue. Post-independence India has tended to frame its arguments about national belonging more around ‘secularism’ and ‘communalism’ or ‘separatism’ than the term ‘nationalism’, at least until the 1990s, when the overthrow of the obligatorily ‘secular’ understanding of nationalism in India and the rise of Hindutva definitions of national belonging forced a more nuanced understanding of nationalism into being, as potentially15 or inherently exclusionary, and the terms ‘religious nationalism’16 or ‘Hindu nationalism’17 were coined to engage with the new phenomenon. The term ‘fascism’ has come to be more frequently used to describe the changes to versions of nationalism that are in current circulation, especially as a government uses the machinery of the state against a selected sample of Indian citizens.18 This, then, is a brief summary, by way of context, on terminological conventions related to nationalism in India, provided here by way of context.19 And since we are now aware that the reinvocation of nationalism by a worldwide conglomerate of right-wing, neo-fascist and palaeo-fascist forces (the paradox of claims to difference and uniqueness being made in a common language among different allegedly unique right-wingers), we can be sure that we are talking about ‘India’ as a variation on a theme, rather than in exceptionalist terms.

14 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Preface’ to Verrier Elwin, A Philosophy for NEFA (Shillong: North-East Frontier Agency, 1959). 15 Basu BD et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 16 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Berkeley, 1994. 17 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s, London, 1996. 18 The first to attempt to use this term consistently in the public domain was Sumit Sarkar: see his article, ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’, Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 28, Issue No. 5 (30 January 1993), pp. 163–167 – it has been anthologised several times since. See also Chapter Six in this volume. 19 One can see this as being in the tradition of Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976); or Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (ed), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vols., Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1993).

6

Introduction

1 Nationalism as Legitimation There is a somewhat circular logic to nationalism. Nations, it is self-evident, have nationalisms. Some, allegedly, have inclusive, tolerant and benign nationalisms. Others have less benign ones. The assumption has long been that it is possible and desirable to have the former kind of nationalism rather than the latter, but that everyone has a nationalism, or a ‘natural’ nation to which to belong. And yet it is notoriously difficult to define this ‘natural’ nation without being, to a greater or lesser extent, exclusionary, sectarian or indeed racist, whether implicitly or explicitly. This is not to suggest that an ‘Indian’ failure in this regard is particularly unique: nationalisms of all kinds claim to be unique as part of their legitimating framework, and yet nationalism is a form of identity that has to be externally as well as internally recognised as a nationalism in order to achieve its legitimacy. What I attempt here is to write about claims to nationalisms in India as well as about trends in Indian social and intellectual history that are not easily assimilable to the ‘national’. These claims are most often sources of exclusion and oppression even as they are sources of liberation. The term ‘Indian’, as used here in this book, is a form of imperfect geographical shorthand, not necessarily implying a commitment to the wider ideological, or claimed spiritual, emotional or intellectual parameters that have overlaid it.20 Inasmuch as I explore the idea of the ‘nation’, I do so in its capacity as a legitimating category in the specific context of ‘Indian’ nationalism and the ambiguities in shifts, for instance, from a ‘regional’ identity to a ‘national’ one (‘Indian’). (‘Region’ and ‘nation’ are of course in the process of ‘nation’formation not given categories but relational ones: a ‘Bengali’ nationalism was a plausible outcome had the geographical entity to be legitimised not been the pre-given category ‘Indian’.) But there should be more to histories of India than the search for or the deconstruction of national imaginings. As a result of an obsession with nationalism, many subtle inflections of class, caste, gender, region, labour or language remain relatively muted in academic literature. More underrepresented still are trends towards loyalism and opportunism, selective collaboration and occasional dissent; of instrumental use of British power by Indian groups with the ability to influence or manipulate policy – due perhaps to the

20 It is imperfect geographical shorthand, because even the alleged geographical unity of the ‘nation’ is an act of appropriation: state borders pre-and post-colonial are far from congruent.

1 Nationalism as Legitimation

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political and historiographical need to find progressive anti-colonial constellations among Indians in the past that also conform to the paradigms of nationalism. Inasmuch as they have been written about, they have been viewed inexorably through nationalist lenses, and most often found wanting: they are inadequately nationalist. Attempts to decentre Indian nationalism as the main problematic of looking at the Indian past are of course not new; and it would be to set up a straw person to claim that the ‘nation’ occupies centre-stage in the imagination of every historian of India. These decentring attempts have, however, to a large extent foundered on what might be called the residual nationalism of many historians of India, including many non-Indians whose identification with India’s national liberation movement was genuine, because their anticolonialism was genuine. Attempts to recover the histories of marginal and forgotten peoples in India foundered on the rocks of the paucity of usable sources, given that the written archive was dominated by colonial documents and ‘the prose of counter-insurgency’,21 and then on those of the epistemological and moral anxieties that beset the human sciences from the 1980s onwards, destroying even radical academics’ confidence in their ability to speak for anyone other than themselves.22 Some acknowledgement of the validity of India’s national cause remains of course obligatory for any writer, lest s/he be accused of pro-imperialist tendencies, or of being ‘anti-national’, the two often taken as being more or less synonymous. Two conceptual distinctions would, to my mind, if consistently made, do a great deal to clarify matters as far as this problem is concerned. The first would insist on a consistent separation of the concepts of state and of nation, which are so often conflated in common usage. (It is not controversial to suggest that nationalism is centrally used in the service of the state’s interests; and anyone on the political left should be trained to ask who controls the state.) The second would separate anti-colonialism from (Indian) nationalism: it is possible to be one without being the other. Briefly put, anti-colonial solidarities

21 Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Subaltern Studies vol. II, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp 45–88. 22 Subaltern Studies, vols. I–X (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983–1999); Subaltern Studies vols. XI–XII (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000–2005); see especially Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313; Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing historiography’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3–34. See discussion on this theme below, in Chapter One.

8

Introduction

built on an identification of an oppressor (and the identification of the oppressor as ‘colonial’ might not be all that clear to those whose solidarities we are speaking of) have no necessarily positive content: ‘who we are against’ is not ‘who we are’. A further jump is required: the positive content of the ‘national’ that ideologues of a ‘nation’ variously described or defined would like the ‘masses’ to have, is a matter of ‘nation-building’, that is, of disciplining actually experienced identities to conform to the requirements of a nationalism that is available in the service of an actual or potential state. Equally, one may conceive of (and there were in existence) nationalisms in India that were not anticolonial, in the sense that they envisaged peaceful co-existence between an Empire and an Indian national loyalty. A third distinction, habitually made by too many writers, should to my mind be abolished: that between the ‘indigenous’ or ‘authentically national’ and the ‘foreign’.23 The theme of ‘authenticity’ is conventional in arguments that claim the national, and attempts to discredit or delegitimise opponents’ ideas as ‘foreign’ are central to nationalist and nation-building polemics. But the argument about the purity of any nation is unsustainable in every case. The counter-polemic that the apparently ‘indigenous’ is actually ‘foreign’ falls into the same discursive trap, and needs to be consistently avoided, lest it be implied that there can be any such thing as a purely national-authentic position. None of this is to suggest that nationalism is an unimportant theme in the history of modern India, nor that it was merely an instrumental category available for use without any related emotional cathexes, intellectual loyalties, or ‘felt communities’.24 Such a claim would be patently ridiculous given that the protagonists in many debates framed their ideas and demands in terms of the Indian nation. However, in dealing with categories and concepts around which claims to legitimation are habitually made, it is important that historians separate contemporaneous claims that they seek to analyse from their own retrospective loyalties and judgements – a form of modified historicism, if you like,

23 I make this point in Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History, c. 1920–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter Four, pp. 157–210, on Gandhian ideas of the village community, and more generally throughout the book. See also Chapter Four below, on the invention of Hinduism. 24 The term is Rajat Kanta Ray’s: see Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality Before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002) on precolonial proto-nations; see also Irfan Habib (ed), India: Studies in the History of an Idea (New Delhi: Munshiram, 2005). The basis of these arguments is that even if the ‘nation’ is an invention, it has some sort of basis, as not all inventions are plausible; the telos of the nation is thus not abandoned.

2 Identities and their Discontents

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that makes an attempt we acknowledge to be impossible, and nonetheless worth the attempt.25 Now, when we are expected to acknowledge ‘affect’, the ‘affective’ power of the nation sits uneasily with historicist claims made on its behalf, or in other words, the ‘affective’ is not apparently enough for the ideologues of the nation to justify a claim to nation-ness. These claims are still made in terms of history, and historians are perhaps not consistent enough in their refusal to justify or endorse them.

2 Identities and their Discontents From this brief set of opening remarks, it is clear that histories of the entity we conventionally call ‘India’ (in common with histories of the entities we call ‘France’ or ‘Germany’, or perhaps one day in common with histories of what we will call ‘Palestine’, ‘Kashmir’ or ‘Kurdistan’) cannot be written without discussing nationalism. If we agree, however, that ‘nationalism’ is not a useful rubric for writing histories that seek not to reproduce the smooth (or even the rough) teleologies of ‘progress’ to ‘nationhood’ of these entities, we would do well to look at broader and more general questions of ‘identity’, not all of them easily transformed into the disciplined and well-ordered identity that might be acknowledged as ‘nationalism’. We would then be able to take account of the tensions and interactions among local, regional, linguistic and religious identities in India, and their relationship or lack thereof, to a sense of ‘national’ identity. We might even begin to challenge existing assumptions about an overarching ‘Indian’ nationalism, while further questioning the possibility of any national identity being non-exclusionary and progressive: indeed, of any national identity being anything other than a form of sectarianism. In raising these questions, we might help to reassess the history of nationalism(s) in India and the literature on nationalism and on national liberation movements. 25 I use ‘historicism’ here not as in Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper & Row, 1961) [1957; the argument appeared under that title in 1944–45 in the journal Economica] or Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (2 vols, London: Routledge, 1945), in which there is an end in the beginning, but in the sense attributed often to Leopold von Ranke on the historian’s judgement not being imposed in retrospect on the past. (Anyone who has read any Ranke can see how reliant he was on ideas of God, the German people, or Destiny, among other things: see Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1874).) I refer to it as a ‘modified historicism’ because the latter view is modified by the understanding that the questions one asks are based on one’s own interests and one’s own histories; but a distinction between a contemporary and a retrospective judgement as recognised by a historian is maintained.

10

Introduction

If I were to paraphrase here the potential plot of a book that seeks not to have a plot, it would run something like this: with European nationalisms beginning to be naturalised by the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and with Europeans having successfully empowered themselves to act as the arbiters of legitimate standards of behaviour, any group of people with a claim to a legitimate collective existence had to claim to be a proper ‘nation’.26 And if ‘nationalism’ was a given language of legitimacy, the geographical/ conceptual space that was to be inhabited by ‘nationals’ was also given: they were the boundaries of India under British rule. Other relevant collective identities did not easily lend themselves to being reformulated in the language of nationalism. The categories ‘Indian’ and ‘nation’ were thus pre-selected for the ideologues of Indian nationalism; identities had to be moulded, disciplined and justified to fit into those straitjackets. This, if you like, is a plot that we shall not follow. We shall attempt to keep it at the back of our mind while addressing a set of related problems. Some of these I have explored elsewhere, but restating them for the sake of context will do no harm, especially as they will recur in the pages that follow.27 One of the major problems of understanding history and politics in modern India is that the terminology is often misleadingly familiar, ‘modern’, or ‘Western’, depending on how you wish to see it – by which I mean that it appears to accept the hegemonic values of its time and space – while the meaning of the terminology is often subtly but significantly different. This often goes unnoticed. The similarity in terminology can be easily explained. Political interventions in political arenas structured by the British colonial power, in order to be effective, had to appeal to principles which the colonial power recognised as valid, and therefore, were at least forced to try and rebut. This meant that an idea which had already secured political and/or academic respectability in Britain or Europe was particularly useful in arguments put forward in India: the credibility of the idea on which the argument was to be based had already been established. Subtle shifts in these ideas in usage in India were in consonance with their gravitating towards a similar idea in use in India that needed to be

26 Are we arguing here for a European origin of ‘nationalism’, or for the simultaneous worldwide emergence of ‘nationalism’? Chris Bayly, in The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Malden, MA, 2004), pp. 199–243, would argue for the latter. This avoids the question of whose conceptual tools or language of legitimation went into the making of the ‘national’. The issue of precise origins is less important here if one considers that once a political idea is available for use in one context, parallels and extensions will be found, and what works as legitimation in one context is used at least as attempted legitimation in another. 27 See, for an elaboration of this argument, Zachariah, Developing India, pp. 12–17.

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expressed in a legitimate language – a problem of linguistic and cultural translation. An argument that asserted India’s unique cultural difference and appeared to use a quasi-mystical rhetoric, say, of ancient Hindu achievement and wisdom, nonetheless used reference points that resonated with the language of ‘Western’ political argument even as it claimed its uniqueness and difference.28 These were, however, useful reference points: they did not necessarily completely express the psycho-political needs of their users. A ‘derivative discourse’ was thus drawn from sources that would lend it strength.29 But the point of the derivation was that it was intended to assist in making certain arguments, not that it was the argument itself. An appeal to ‘foreign’ principles alone would not help: what was it that was ‘indigenous’ about the argument? One of the problems that greatly exercised societies under colonial rule is that of the search for an ‘authentic’ identity, one that is not mediated or contaminated by colonial rule, and therefore one that was truly ‘indigenous’. This question of authenticity and consequently of separating the indigenous from the foreign is one that dominates the psycho-political life of many colonial intellectuals. Given the standards of legitimacy that exist, it tends to be expressed as a central problem of nationalism, which has to be both universal (everybody allegedly has them, and in recognisable form) and particular (they must be different from one another’s) – in this sense, nationalisms are rather like genitalia.30 This introduces a recurrent problem that becomes central to the theatrics of identity and the necessity of nationalism: the importance of engaging with the coloniser in justifying oneself in everyday life. And there is a concurrent yearning for a situation in which this is not necessary. Can this be seen as the classical situation of the intellectual engaging with colonialism? How does this relate to constructions of identity, and of nationalism as a privileged form of identity,

28 For a discussion of a similar problem, see Paul Cohen, ‘The problem with “China’s Response to the West”’, in Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 9–55. Impact-response is a flawed, unresponsive and one-way model for describing the borrowings of ideas and influences, leaving too little agency with the recipient. 29 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 30 The analogy is drawn from work on the contingency of sex identities, which in turn draws on medical evidence on the existence of more than two biological sexes. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), which uses this fact centrally. However, I am not sure that the performance of nationalism is particularly subversive; nor indeed the ‘subversive’ performance of ‘gender’ as Butler sees it (in which latter debate I shall not take a position here, except of uncertainty; but see also Martha Nussbaum. ‘The Professor of Parody’, The New Republic vol. 22, no. 2 (1999), pp. 37–45).

12

Introduction

towards which goal individuals and collectivities must be disciplined? The theatrics of national identity were to a large extent directed at an imagined and internalised audience of the colonial ruler. (This contention is premised on an understanding, reasonably commonplace in the literature on nationalism, and accepted here, that it is an elite who constitutes the carriers of nationalist ideology; this ideology is then aimed downwards in a mobilisational manner.)31 I have used the term psycho-political: this is a difficult term to systematically use, and is perhaps not conducive to such use. But for the fortuitous conjuncture that placed the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in a ward at an Algiers hospital during the Algerian struggle for independence, not much direct evidence would exist of such matters as the psychopathology of colonial rule, in situations of exceptional violence or of commonplace, everyday violence.32 Nonetheless, sensitivity to potential psychological concerns, inasmuch as one can read them in one’s sources, is I believe essential to good historical writing on the subjectivities of human existence. They are impossible fully to grasp; but a refusal to attempt to do so is an evasion of responsibility.

3 The Historiographical Problem: Residual Nationalism ‘Nationhood’, then, became from the last decades of the nineteenth century the paradigm of legitimacy within which claims to collective political existence needed to be made. Therefore, for a group of people claiming more political rights from a colonial power, the resort to the category ‘nation’ was logical as well as necessary. And since at the time nations had to have a ‘natural’ link to an ancient past, such a past was indeed sought. Let us return to some of the separations made above, by way of slight clarification. ‘National’ has more or less become, in our times, the surrogate term for state-led or state-endorsed; and this elision, though obfuscatory, is politically reasonable, for the versions of nationalism that are validated in the public

31 In this connection see Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilise’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (ed), Subaltern Studies vol. VII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 69–120. It remains to be pointed out that what is being performed before the colonial ruler is often a different version of ‘nationalism’, and in the South Asian case, there is an elite assumption that religion mobilises, and therefore the ‘masses’ will get religion, suitably ‘nationalised’. The extent to which this is a downward projection of a colonial stereotype about the fundamental other-worldliness of ‘Eastern’ thought, is also part of a longer debate. 32 Frantz Fanon, ‘Colonial war and mental disorders’, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1967) [1961], pp. 200–250.

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domain tend not to be able to exist without support from the state. At any rate, it is in the interest of the custodians of the state to conflate the state and the ‘nation’. The ‘national’ invokes the legitimacy of popular sovereignty in the service of the state; and without that legitimacy, the state cannot parade its ‘democratic’ credentials. There are of course types of nationalism, not all of them equally desirable: ‘civic’, ‘ethnic’, ‘developmentalist’, ‘culturalist’, or other variations on the ‘national’ theme that serve to map the pluralist versus particularist models of political system onto nationalisms and thereby states. Let us accept, for the moment, that the state is sui generis but needs a legitimating ideology: then perhaps it is logical to discover that if we start from the state, the monopoly of legitimate violence,33 an organ of coercion and class rule,34 and find ourselves discussing the nation and nationalism, the sovereignty of the people, the claim to the congruence of nation and state,35 we are entangling ourselves in that legitimating ideology. The question also arises – since we are dealing not only with ‘the state’ as an ideal-typical model, but also with a particular state which makes claims to being different from other states (the basis of national claims) – how states distinguish themselves from one another. Is it that to justify its particularity, a state must invoke some characteristics that inevitably exclude: ‘values’, negatively, in the case of the ideal-typical ‘civic nationalism’, but can this not also become an invocation of ‘our values’? And is it that to legitimately monopolise violence, the state must invoke the ‘nation’?36 We are dealing very often, at least in the international (by which is mean inter-state) domain, with the assumptions of an idealised ‘liberalism’ (a term that is now often used as if transparent, despite its normative function overpowering

33 Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’, lecture, Munich University, 1918, reprinted in translation as ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in HH Gerth and C Wright Mills (ed & transl), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (new edn, London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 77–128; the definition appears on p. 78: ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. 34 Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1874), VI Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918); available online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statismanarchy.htm and http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ respectively, both accessed 28.01.2020. 35 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 36 It is possible to invoke Foucault here: Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (ed), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–104, which indicates how ‘governmental rationality’ operates. Somehow, recent scholarship has been keen to talk about ‘colonial governmentality’ but not ‘national governmentality’.

14

Introduction

its descriptive one) that sees the pluralism contained in its own ideologies, as capable of being universalised.37 If this is simply brought to bear on studies of India in retrospect, we have a problem of anachronism on our hands. ‘Liberalism’ as a category was seldom directly invoked in Indian political discussions in the twentieth century; it has increasingly done so in the post-Cold War environment, and Indian academic writing that in part addresses an audience in the Anglo-American world tends to use it today as if it were a selfevident category.38 Historians have, however, at least from the 1980s, been sceptical about the ‘naturalness’ of nations. Modern nations, we are told, write their histories retrospectively in order to justify their presents by their pasts.39 So we have learned

37 It might not be misplaced to point out, following the Skinner debate – for a summary, see James Tully (ed), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) – that political language is both normative and descriptive, and that ‘liberalism’, ‘pluralism’, ‘democracy’, ‘nationalism’, etc. are normative claims that seek to legitimate political activity (i.e. political claims are made in these terms) but are often in danger of lacking any agreed-upon descriptive content. 38 According to the ‘Begriffsgeschichte’ approach pioneered by the editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, one cannot understand the politics of a given society without understanding the relevant political concepts or categories through which that politics is rendered intelligible and practiced. ‘Liberalism’ is not a central Begriff for 20th century India, either as term or concept. On the issues involved, see for instance Reinhart Koselleck’s programmatic introduction in volume 1 of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vols., Stuttgart: Klett, 1972–1993), which many reviewers have pointed out is not entirely in consonance with the approaches of all contributors to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. See also Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (1967), pp. 81–99, and Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte and Social History’ in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, transl. Keith Tribe), pp. 73/91 [in original: Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte’ in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 107–129]. An assessment of the possibilities of Begriffsgeschichte from the early 1990s stressed ‘the extraordinary difficulty of translating the meaning of terms and concepts from one language into another, from one cultural tradition into another, and from one intellectual climate into another’: Detlef Junker, ‘Preface’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (ed), The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, Occasional Paper No. 15 (1996), Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, p 6. The problem is also one of wanting to map terms too closely onto concepts, which is perhaps a problem of translation of ‘Begriff’, which is both term and concept. The same term could refer to different concepts; the same concept could be rendered by different terms. The difficulties with the arbitrary sign have not been fully grappled with in this tradition, although making something of the Saussurean distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic. 39 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); EJ Hobsbawm and

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to take nationalism as a claim to the collective existence and consciousness of a group of people in search of a state and of state power. As historians we do not have to take these claims as true, even if we take them seriously because some people believe the claims and can be made to act in various ways on their basis. And yet, the decentring of nationalism in (Indian) history and historiography is an incomplete project. Distinctions between nationalism and anticolonialism are not drawn out strongly enough; neither are those between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’. The attempt to separate ‘true nationalism’, an inclusive and benign nationalism, from ‘communalism’, ‘sectarianism’ or ‘Hindu nationalism’, whatever one likes to call it, continues to be made but does not work, and more and more writers who are uneasy about this separation are beginning to make their voices heard.40 The necessary alliance between the socialist left and other nationalists in the course of the anti-colonial struggle was intended to be a provisional and temporary one. Unfortunately, the left could not extricate itself from that nationalism afterwards. This in part was due to the language of legitimacy of a newly independent former colony. Nationalism was an essential part of this; and the recovery of an independent left voice that was not imprisoned in the shibboleths of nationalism has been nearly impossible from within the language of legitimate politics. Let us look at the distinction between anticolonialism and nationalism. It is important not to assume that the two should be congruent in order to be legitimate. There have been attempts to write about South Asia from outside this assumption; but if, for instance, one looks back at early writing by the Subaltern Studies project, the distinction between a ‘true’ nationalism and mere anticolonialism is maintained.41 (Later, Dipesh Chakrabarty would use this as a

TO Ranger (ed), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86–106; Homi K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 40 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999, pp. 1–20; Sulagna Roy, ‘The Impossibility of “Communalism”’, unpublished paper presented at the conference on ‘Ideas and Institutions in India’, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, 1998; Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). 41 See Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies vol 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–8, and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

16

Introduction

polemic against Sumit Sarkar, to indicate that South Asian history is implicitly measured against Europe’s and written up as the history of a lack of something,42 and Sumit Sarkar would point to Ranajit Guha’s search for the subaltern’s contribution to nationalism in the Subaltern Studies group’s manifesto as evidence that nationalist paradigms continued to dominate.)43 To me, the point seems to be that several writers were worried about the ‘national’ framework and seeking to avoid it, but that something akin to what we might call a phenomenon of ‘first language interference’ comes into play: since these writers were generally Indian historians of Indian nationalism, they found it difficult to disentangle themselves from it. The fact is that nationalism, because it is associated with the anti-colonial struggle, cannot, apparently, be altogether rejected. At least implicitly, the idea of an inclusive, benign, national entity that is India must be present in historians’ minds. Whether this is a strategic position rather than a believed one is difficult to tell. Perhaps it is essential to maintain allegiance to the ‘nation’ in order to achieve what many Indian historians seek to do: to remain politically effective as well as academically active, because the charge of being ‘anti-national’ is the most damning criticism in most political systems. In public rhetoric, whenever reasons of state require a somewhat pompous and grandiose justification, the custodians of the state refer to the state as ‘the nation’, thereby putting potential opponents of those particular reasons of state, and opponents of those particular custodians of the state, on the defensive. Let me return to the plot that we shall not follow: With European nationalisms naturalised by the mid- to late-nineteenth century, any people with a claim to a legitimate collective existence had to claim to be a proper ‘nation’: that was the norm, and also a resource for legitimate argument. But in addition, the geographical/conceptual space that was to be inhabited by ‘nationals’ was also given: they were the boundaries of India under British rule. Other relevant collective identities – linguistically-imagined communities, for instance – were less legitimate and had to be remoulded. Was ‘nationhood’ to be achieved simply by projecting, say, the Bengali collectivity onto India as a whole?44

42 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonialism and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations 37 (Winter 1992), pp 1–26. 43 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames. 44 See Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp. 3–13, on the predetermined nature of the ‘national’. On ‘colonial state-space’, see Manu Goswami, Producing India (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).

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4 Anticolonialism, Nationalism, Communalism Since the 1980s, then, historians’ increasing scepticism of nationalism as anything more than a claim based on an invented genealogy led to a closer scrutiny of the claims of nationalisms (which is not to suggest that they made the mistake of regarding them as unreal or unimportant).45 However, national liberation movements, whose claim to liberation was legitimised by their ‘nation-ness’, were not subjected to quite the same interrogation lest the liberation struggles themselves be delegitimised in the process. The ‘right of nations to selfdetermination’ was the principle to be fought for.46 But could this right only be claimed by nations?47 The colonial myth of the not-yet-nation as not yet deserving freedom could always be brought into play in such a scenario.48

45 See Chapter One. 46 See Arno Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) [1959]; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The latter argues that Wilson rather than Lenin represented the aspirations of the time: since the Russian Revolution was relatively new, more leaders of anticolonial movements (Manela calls them ‘nationalists’) trusted in Wilson than in Lenin. The question, since Manela did his research in the Woodrow Wilson papers and not in Lenin’s correspondence, is whether a conclusion from Wilson’s papers that Wilson is very important might be based on skewed sources. The larger question, of whether the origins of anticolonial nationalism can be attributed to a ‘moment’ represented by the American President, is perhaps one of over-egging an argument for sales purposes. 47 There is of course a debate in Marxist circles on the importance of national selfdetermination even before the young Soviet state has to confront this question. See for instance, Lenin’s argument with Rosa Luxemburg in VI Lenin, The Right of Nations to SelfDetermination (1914), http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/index.htm, accessed 28.01.2020. The following general statement is relevant: ‘The categorical requirement of Marxist theory in investigating any social question is that it be examined within definite historical limits, and, if it refers to a particular country (e.g., the national programme for a given country), that account be taken of the specific features distinguishing that country from others in the same historical epoch.’ Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Chapter Two, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch02.htm, accessed 28.01.2020. The dispute hinges on Lenin’s reliance on an external observer recognising that some claims to nationhood are proper ones worth supporting. 48 This is a principle allegedly present in one of the founding texts of ‘liberalism’ (also of course a retrospective and reified construction): John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862) [1861], especially Chapter XVI, ‘Of Nationality as Connected With Representative Government’, pp 308–319, which contains remarks on ‘barbarous’ peoples and superior and inferior ‘civilizations’ (England and India respectively, in the latter case: p 316), but is more subtle than has generally been assumed. See also John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Watts & Co, 1948) [1859], especially on the

18

Introduction

Although in the Indian context, the presumed unity and harmony of the nationalist struggle (by which is meant the anticolonial struggle) had been questioned in the 1960s and 1970s largely from the metropolitan right (for instance by those who saw Indian nationalism as a set of self-interested factions or at best a coalition of regional elites: the so-called ‘Cambridge School’) and in the 1980s from the left, in an attempt to recover the histories of ordinary people (with the attendant dangers of glorifying the apparently ‘indigenous’: this is a tendency in Subaltern Studies), this did not lead to a questioning of the validity of any national imagining. The metropolitan right-wing critique saw Indian nationalism as somehow deficient, and left critiques either saw some anti-colonial struggles as not properly nationalist (and therefore also deficient) or saw some imaginings of India as inadequately inclusive, therefore sectarian or ‘communal’, as against ‘secular nationalism’, which was desirable and to be supported. And to belabour the point: many other histories of Indian nationalism, as event-history, tended simply to conflate anti-colonial struggle with Indian nationalism, taking the latter as a given. Most have written of an imagined Indian nationalism that is, or can be, tolerant and inclusive of minorities; even the subtlest writers on Indian nationalism appear to find the necessity of leaving open this possibility. There were moments at which this line of thinking could have changed in the 1980s and 1990s; indeed, it seems paradoxical that it did not change. Chris Bayly wrote in 1998: Indian liberal and left opinion became increasingly suspicious of the degree to which the state, beneficiary of the Indian nationalist struggle, appeared to be the inheritor of the centralising and unitary traditions of European state-building and the fervid nationalism to which this had given rise.49

This is of course what ought to have happened; it did not. Nasty nationalisms, excessive nationalisms, were still complacently thought to be a preserve of the metropolitan countries, the Europeans, the former colonisers, the aggressors. (Curiously, it was the other way round for commentators in the former metropoles: it was the slightly hysterical and hypersensitive natives in backward countries, and in the former communist bloc, whose nationalisms were exaggerated

limitations of the concept of popular sovereignty exercised by the ‘nation’ collectively, and the need to recognise that it is only a part of the whole that exercises power over the rest: pp 4–5; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: a Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 49 CA Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p vi.

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and potentially dangerous.)50 Subject nations were allowed their nationalisms, and their excesses or exclusions – ‘communalism’, ‘sectarianism’ or ‘Hindu revivalism’ – were glossed over because these were apparently aberrations when viewed against the ideally possible, enlightened, cosmopolitan and inclusive forms of belonging that a former colony such as India could offer: the so-called ‘Nehruvian consensus’, in particular. Everything else was inferior or inadequate. Obviously, there is a tendency to look favourably at what we call a ‘national liberation movement’ as opposed to nationalism per se. As Nehru was wont to put it, a people that was not free could not but be prone to some amount of what he called ‘narrow nationalism’.51 He expected this to go away when freedom came. But what if even an anticolonial nationalism is a nasty nationalism? There is no reason why it could not be one. Let us suggest, as an alternative formulation, that ‘Indian liberal and left opinion’ was bewildered by the rise of an aggressive and explicitly Hindu form of nationalism, but instead of responding to this by recognising that all nationalisms had a tendency to be, or to become, aggressive and exclusionary, tried to claim Indian nationalism for itself while attempting to deny that space to the Hindu nationalists. They sought to do that by separating an inclusive, ‘true’ nationalism from a ‘false’ ‘communalism’.52 It is necessary to relate this trend in the historiography of South Asia to, let us say, scholarly production after 6 December 1992. This was the day of the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fanatics, encouraged and funded by the so-called ‘Sangh Parivar’, the umbrella term for various Hindu right-wing (we would now say fascist) organisations.53 This act, and the violence and insecurity that followed, made many people rather belatedly question the image of India as a tolerant and secular democracy. Meanwhile, the axiomatic principles

50 Michael Billig makes the point for metropolitan countries that in the view of commentators from those countries, their nationalisms were normalised by the banality and everydayness of their presence; and their damaging effects not seen. Excessive nationalisms existed elsewhere, in ‘backward countries’. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), esp. pp 5–7. His argument that nationalism has to a large extent been ‘produced by the modern nationstate’ needs to be taken far more seriously: p 9. 51 See Chapter Five. 52 ‘Communalism’, for instance, remained a false nationalism in the very influential pamphlet: T Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 53 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a non-Eurocentric understanding of fascism’, Transcultural Studies (December 2014), pp. 63–100; Debojit Thakur, ‘Fascio Indica’, unpublished MA thesis, Central European University, Budapest, 2019.

20

Introduction

of Indian ‘secularism’, whose sacredness had hitherto been acknowledged even by those who flagrantly disregarded them in practice, were challenged. Hindu fundamentalists now referred to secular intellectuals as ‘pseudo-secularists’ who pandered to backward Muslim sentiments, and did not understand the allegedly truly secular and tolerant nature of Hinduism itself. As a consequence, the hitherto stable terminology of legitimate politics teetered on the brink of undergoing major changes. (The term ‘communalism’ retained its former negative connotations: no one claimed communalism as a positive term, not even the Sangh Parivar). The battle was joined by a politically active historiography that began to trace the genealogy of Hindu communalism,54 with the attendant danger that historians found, in a standard search for origins, what they were looking for. Suddenly the South Asian past was full of Hindu communalists. I do not of course suggest that the Hindu communalists unearthed from the past did not exist; indeed, one of the problems of well-meaning history-writing in India has been that sectarian conflicts in the past have often not been fully acknowledged or adequately written about for fear of seeming to legitimate (allegedly similar) conflicts in the present and future. (This is of course based on the assumption of the necessary continuity and relative stability of ‘identities’, an assumption that historians have sometimes tended implicitly to acknowledge despite their fear of legitimating sectarian conflict, and therefore potentially tending paradoxically to legitimate exactly that.)55 As far as the Indian ‘nationalist movement’ is concerned, it has long been known – and sometimes acknowledged – that several prominent Congressmen were Hindu parochialists or at least did not like Muslims, and were certainly not keen to

54 David Ludden (ed), Making India Hindu (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst, 1996) [1993] are examples of the post-1992 literature. See also S Gopal (ed), Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India (London: Zed Books, 1993) [first published 1991, thus pre-dating the demolition of the mosque, but already expressing the fear that the threatened demolition would take place]; Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedy, Shail Mayaram and Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanambhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 55 The fear is to be found in the well-known and analytically apt pamphlet: Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969). The argument that sectarian historians have used history to justify present-day projects is sound: the argument that non-sectarian historians must similarly present a non-sectarian version of the past is based on the continuity of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ past and present – an assumption which at least one of the authors of that pamphlet, Romila Thapar, has done much to invalidate. See for instance Romila Thapar, Early India: from the origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) [2002].

4 Anticolonialism, Nationalism, Communalism

21

share power with them.56 But if this were to be said too loudly, it might appear to be an acknowledgement of the validity of the ‘two-nation theory’, or at least a validation of Pakistan or of ‘Muslim separatism’. This would betray the integrity of the ‘Indian nation’, an entity that many believed ought to have emerged from the anticolonial struggle as an intact, single state and ought not even retrospectively to be delegitimised. There were of course many self-avowedly Hindu ideologues who regarded Muslims as alien outsiders to the ‘true’ and ‘Hindu’ (in some versions ‘Aryan’) nation. These, allegedly, were the ‘communalists’. Many writers preferred to draw sharp lines between ‘nationalism’ and ‘communalism’ than to acknowledge the ambiguities of these categories – often for politically laudable reasons. This line has been maintained by some; others, post-1992, have gone to the extreme of arguing that all South Asian nationalisms were ‘religious nationalisms’; and that except for the communists (who were alien outsiders anyway), Indian nationalists imagined the nation as Hindu.57 It is curious, though not incorrect, that communists were for this purpose referred to as nationalists. In effect, and perhaps for initially instrumental reasons, they were indeed nationalists – although in the 1940s, it was unclear whether they were Indian nationalists, Muslim nationalists, or multi-nationalists, as they sought to work with and within the left wing of the Muslim League even as they maintained leadership of peasant struggles.58 As I have suggested, Indian communists were then, and have certainly since become, entangled in nationalism. If we think back to the dispute over the attempted censorship by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of the collection of historical documents of the Towards Freedom project coordinated by the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), the point of contention was that the document collection appeared to be denying the political predecessors of the Sangh Parivar the nationalist genealogy that they wanted, by showing that the Hindu Mahasabha’s or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)’s anti-colonial credentials were not

56 See William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); he still distinguishes hard and soft Hindu parochialism. He does not consistently raise analytical questions about the possible instrumental uses of some of this Hindu rhetoric in politics, and ignores, crucially, the Congress’ use of Muslim religious rhetoric in other contexts. 57 van der Veer, Religious Nationalism; In his generalisation about all South Asian nationalisms being religious, he omits the notable example of Bangladesh, concentrates on India and provides occasional references to Pakistan. Nepal and Sri Lanka are not on his agenda. 58 See Chapter Five; also Chapter Two.

22

Introduction

good. This was in fact so effective that it provoked the BJP’s attempt at stopping the publication of the volumes: obviously, the yardstick of legitimacy that the anticolonial struggle was able to provide was a necessary present-day political resource.59 The conflation of (Indian) nationalism with the anti-colonial struggle was more than evident in such a case. It is clear that history had to be compatible with a nationalist remembering of the past, and that that nationalist remembering depends on anticolonialism. Early documents of that robust institution of Indian historical scholarship, the Indian Council for Historical Research, make this explicit, in connection with one of its own earlier projects: they protected the need for national history: Interest in the history of its past is natural to every people. For history is not merely a record of the currents of events and movement of ideas which have moulded the present, it is an endeavour on the part of the consciousness of a people to realize the substance of its identity through the vicissitudes of the ages. History is the self-reflection and the selfrevelation of the national mind . . . Each generation therefore has to write its own history, to lift the mirror to its own soul.60

The document manages to stress that generations write their histories differently, but nonetheless nationally, and that, in its own words, ‘the service of truth’ and ‘a truly national effort’ were not only compatible but were fundamentally the same.61 But if professional historians were to be bound up with official national rememberings of the past, what if the body in control of that official national remembering changed its version of nationalism? That was what happened in the case of the ICHR. And although the editors of the Towards Freedom series defended themselves in terms of their professional integrity – and sometimes, disingenuously, on the basis of the ‘facts speaking for themselves’ in collections of documents62 – rather than explicitly in terms of the superiority of their version of nationalism, or their version of history, it was clear that, much of the time, the space that was being contested was the place in the anticolonial

59 See e.g. Parvathi Menon, ‘The Falsification of History’, Frontline, vol. 17 no. 6 (March 18–31, 2000). Sumit Sarkar provides his own account in ‘Hindutva and History’, Beyond Nationalist Frames, pp 244–262. 60 Statement on the proposed ‘Comprehensive History of India’, n.d., Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, Part II, Sl. No. 81, f. 199. 61 Statement on the proposed ‘Comprehensive History of India’, f. 201. 62 Parvathi Menon, ‘The Falsification of History’.

4 Anticolonialism, Nationalism, Communalism

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struggle of the predecessors of the present-day left and the predecessors of the present-day right; and therefore their re(tro)spective nationalist credentials. Politics in India still draws its genealogies and legitimation from the period of the anticolonial struggle.63 I am not suggesting that there is not a relatively larger underlying point to be considered: that of the importance of a historical record that is – however relativistic one wants to be – not deliberately tampered with to produce official versions. So the Archaeological Survey of India producing fake evidence for Hindutva’s nefarious purposes is not to be ignored.64 Nor are the strange publications by ‘Hindu’ or ‘Aryan’ ideologues on the internet and in print, complete with apparently respectable academic paraphernalia of footnotes, cross-references and so on; although the question is open as to the best way to engage with or rebut such arguments which circulate among a lay public interested in justifying their identities and anxieties through history, whether or not this history is taken seriously by professional historians. But let us refine the distinction that I have proposed to maintain between anticolonialism and nationalism. Anticolonialism, whether clearly articulated or implicitly present, we have been told before, was not necessarily nationalism (the 1857 rebels, for instance, lacked the little something called a ‘modern’ outlook that might have qualified them as Indian nationalists). Perhaps we also need to be told that not all Indian nationalism(s?) was/were anticolonial – instead of only, as we are still told, that ‘communalist’ groups were not anticolonial, or at any rate anticolonial enough. This may or may not be true: and what if they were? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, whose articulation of an Indian nationalism centred on being Hindu has quite correctly been seen as ‘communal’, not to mention fascist, had impeccable credentials as an anticolonial ‘terrorist’, and spent years in colonial prisons;65 and Lajpat Rai’s death (after his being beaten up by police while demonstrating against the Simon Commission), as

63 The second avatar of Hindutva government went a step better with the ICHR, declaring that it would step back into the ancient Hindu golden age, funding only research relevant to that age, and mostly from texts that were once considered mythological, but the battered and barely-surviving profession of historians would not swallow that one. See https://www.live mint.com/Opinion/9lC3ZaRuatsifxfSqxQHpM/Salil-Tripathi-Narendra-Modi-and-100-days.html and https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ichr-member-secretary-resigns/article7332723.ece both last accessed 28.01.2020. 64 See for instance Julia Shaw, ‘Ayodhya’s sacred landscape: ritual memory, politics and archaeological “fact”’, Antiquity, September 2000, pp. 693–700. 65 Dhananjay Keer, Veer Savarkar (Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1966); VD Savarkar, The Story of My Transportation For Life (Bombay: Sadbhakti Publications, 1950).

24

Introduction

well as his career in a wider sense, was proof of his anticolonialism, his sectarian sentiments against Muslims notwithstanding.66 Lajpat Rai was, for instance, instrumental in raising support for the Indian struggle for independence from Britain among people of strongly left-wing sympathies and politics elsewhere in the world, who were clearly not mobilised out of a fundamental sectarian sympathy for the coming Hindu millennium. Among them was the American radical, Agnes Smedley, who was involved with Indian revolutionaries in the USA, then lived with Viren Chattopadhyay in Berlin for several years, and was Jawaharlal Nehru’s contact to the Chinese revolution.67

Figure 1: Agnes Smedley (1892-1950), the American socialist who connected the Indian struggle for independence with the Chinese Revolution from her Berlin base. Photograph taken c. 1914. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

66 See VC Joshi (ed), Lajpat Rai: Autobiographical Writings (Delhi: University Publishers, 1965); Kenneth W. Jones, ‘Communalism in the Punjab: The Arya Samaj Contribution’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (November 1968), pp. 39–54. 67 Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth (New York: Feminist Press, 1973) [1929]; Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944), pp. 13–14; Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Nirode C Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Anticolonialism, perhaps, is a less attractive rubric: it is less coherent than nationalism because it has a negative content but not a positive one. But equally, an attempt to define nationalism too precisely would always make its inevitable exclusions more explicit and either make that nationalism fail, or disqualify large portions of a state’s citizens from the sense of belonging that is nationalism. For this purpose, maybe our separation of anticolonialism and nationalism gives the game away: we know who we are against, but not who we are without knowing who we are against. And we need new people to be against in order to know who we are again.

5 Ways Out or Ways Back In? We have noted the impossibility of a viable definition of Indian nationalism, and indeed of any nationalism, that is properly inclusive; and it may further be argued that a non-exclusionary nationalism is in fact no longer classifiable as nationalism, and can only proceed by refusing to define itself, because any definition would make explicit its exclusions.68 Nationalism is obviously too narrow to be a universal category: it divides human beings from each other; and very few have ever really claimed that a universal nationalism is achievable even within the boundaries of a single state, or that any nationalism is more than an elite project which attempts, and perhaps for a time succeeds, in mobilising the ‘masses’.69 (One could, of course, go back to Mazzini and postulate a world in which each ‘nation’ discovers itself and creates itself a state, following which the world can live in harmony.)70 If the search for universal categories is considered too large for scholars whose origins and loyalties are bound up in a world that requires nationalisms, this needs at least to be openly acknowledged. At the very least, a disentanglement of historians from the categories they study for the purposes of that study seems to me to be necessary. 68 See Chapter Five. 69 Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’ idea has been influential in this regard; Lenin’s idea of when a national struggle is worth supporting is also worth thinking about in this connection: Antonio Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 44–122; VI Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. On Gramsci and ‘passive revolution’, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 70 It is also true that Mazzini thought in terms of a national working class: see his ‘Preface to the Italian Working Class’, in Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), pp. ix–xiii.

26

Introduction

There are indications that this is beginning to be seriously attempted. A burst of publications from the late 1990s to the present demonstrate that established and new figures in the historiography of India are attempting to recast the metanarrative of Indian nationalism more critically.71 Regional, caste- and community-sensitive or gender-oriented histories are more willing to see that nationalism is, and more consistently that all nationalisms are, at least potentially, ‘dangerous’.72 The complicity of scholarship and nationalism is opened up for scrutiny, not merely on the ‘imperialist’ side, as has been the case for some years, but also on the ‘nationalist’ side.73 These attempts have not always been as successful or coherent as they might have been; they are as yet far from hegemonic,74 and are beset by their own hesitancies. A recent attempt declares its intention to avoid ‘methodological nationalism’, but then ends up writing a coherent metanarrative of Indian nationalism and the creation of the ‘national state-space’.75 Another one starts from the point that it is necessary to provide a critique of nationalism, but further states that existing critiques of nationalism are ‘based primarily on the grounds of its origins in the modern West’ before proceeding to the old distinction between a cultural (bad) nationalism and a secular (better) one.76 Indeed, even as some voices attempt to refuse an intellectual alliance with nationalism, and yet find themselves entangled in it, there continue to appear a number of sophisticated defences of forms of

71 For attempts to do this, see for example Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames; Satish Deshpande, ‘Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth-century India’, Subaltern Studies XI (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), pp 167–211; Goswami, Producing India. 72 Anne McClintock, quoted in Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Women and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p 5. 73 Vinay Lal, The History of History: politics and scholarship in modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. Chapters 1 and 2: a strangely Gandhian declaration at the end that history must be forgotten in order to create a harmonious national entity somewhat jars on a reader’s sensibilities; and a useful anthology, Saurabh Dube (ed), Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-Writing on India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 74 I use the word in the Gramscian sense: see Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’. 75 Goswami, Producing India. Given that the act of writing about nationalism tends to draw attention to it, perhaps solutions to this problem are not that simple. It leads to one of Frederick Cooper’s questions: how can one study colonial societies, keeping in mind – but not being paralysed by – the fact that the tools of analysis we use emerged from the history we are trying to examine? Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p 2. 76 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, pp. 2–3.

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nationalism in general, and of anti-colonial nationalisms in particular.77 Even the idea of the organicist nation, best known in its Nazi form, is now reclaimed, in a set of dubious philosophical manoeuvres, to be a route to liberation, as allegedly all liberationist ideas contain an organicist element.78 The national somehow also becomes the route to ‘cosmopolitan’ identities.79 Or a (French) civic nationalism is defended despite an acknowledgement that nationalisms are often cases of the oppressed becoming the oppressors of others – on the grounds that a ‘transitional object’, psychoanalytically, is required, before one can make the transition away from the mother/nation.80 Clearly, then, a heightened awareness from the 1990s onwards of the exaggerated claims of Indian nationalism to inclusivity or benign tolerance has not led to the expected outcome of rejecting nationalism as an internalised framework for historians. Why this is so requires a longer engagement than has been attempted here, though perhaps some of the above discussions might point the way to some answers. The complicity of scholarship with the politics of historiography, and the complicity of historians in a nationalist project, still requires further scrutiny. As often as it is pointed out, a residual nationalism seems to still keep creeping in.81 This amounts to saying something we have known for some time: that historians write national histories without knowing it, and thereby contribute to

77 For instance, Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), wishes to make an exceptionalist case for anti-colonial nationalisms as more legitimate than metropolitan ones. 78 Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: passages of freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) makes the extraordinary move of defending an organicist view of solidarity and thus nationhood as the basis of all liberationist ideas, the association of organicism with Nazi and fascist ideas notwithstanding. 79 A number of the writers in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (ed), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) seem to think that the way ‘beyond’ the nation lies ‘through’ it (though it would be beyond the scope of the current work to now begin to dissect the literature on cosmopolitanism(s) and nationalisms.) 80 Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) makes what amounts to a very conventional defence of the French model of an allegedly civic and universal nationalism, a position that only Francophone insularity and arrogance can continue to take seriously. (It begins with a polemic against an immigrant with a strange name.) 81 Perhaps, then, it does make sense to talk of ‘the endurance of nationalism’, not so much historically, but historiographically, and of course the complicity of the two and consequently the difficulty of treating them separately is clear. Might it be important to cite Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)? This is a work that might just indicate that primordialist positions are not yet dead, and genetic and biologistic arguments might still serve the cause of nationalism.

28

Introduction

naturalising the ‘nation’. As a result of this naturalisation, habits of thinking beyond the nation are hard to develop. And states that exist already on the basis of a national claim, or come into being as a result of one, are ultimately the beneficiaries of this naturalisation that legitimates the claim without seeming to do anything at all. This is still short of saying that people actually believe in a national ideology: some do, perhaps, but the point of a legitimating ideology is that people feel the need externally to conform to its demands even when they don’t believe it at all. More importantly: this question is seldom tested; most often, a claim is made on behalf of the ‘masses’ that they already belong in and to the ‘nation’ – by a self-proclaimed national elite, who are either simply happy to assert this, or are projecting their desires and demands onto the ‘people’ at large. Evidence for this belonging, when it is produced at all, is provided by a reference to practices or solidarities that may belong to the everyday lives of people or groups claimed by that national elite; what these people or groups might think of this appropriation is harder to trace, and is usually not traced. What, though, are the alternative frameworks? Alternatives to what? Here, academics have become involved in chasing normative categories rather than recognising that they are often trapped in a game of naming. Not ‘doing’ national history is in danger of simply becoming a new fashion that does not, in fact, abjure national histories but simply ends up reifying them by marking every border-crossing as exceptional. The alternative candidates to ‘national’ history are many: ‘global’ history (allegedly tracing ‘global’ trends before and during the period of ‘globalisation’ or during earlier periods of ‘proto-globalisation’);82 ‘transnational’ histories that allegedly do not observe national boundaries (and no one

82 A proliferation of ‘global’ historians, armed with a journal, the Journal of Global History, and running courses and writing textbooks, has in many ways merely disarmed the idea of the specialist, replacing it with a new Eurocentrism – this cannot be a solution to the hypernationalism of some historiography. What is even more peculiar is that ‘global history’ is in fact attempting to be a specialisation. There is more to be said on the subject, though perhaps not here, as it does not pertain to the subject at hand: but see Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment: South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World’, in Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (ed), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views 1917–1939 (Delhi: Sage, 2015), pp. vii-xli; especially pp. xxi-xxix. Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The world in a grain of sand: global histories and their framing’, paper presented at the conference ‘The contemporary history of historiography: international perspectives on the making of professional history’ held at the German Historical Institute, London, 16–18 June 2016; and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Truly Global Aspirations of Global History’, draft paper for a hypothetical conference sometime in the future, deals with these questions in more depth.

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is really sure what the difference between transnational and global history is, unless the former deals merely with more than one state and the latter more than two).83 Earlier claimants included ‘postcolonialism’ (which appears to gesture towards a solidarity of co-victimhood across the world, but ends up celebrating an exceptionalism of the postcolony at its broadest, and of a particular postcolonial nationalism at its narrowest);84 ‘cosmopolitanism(s)’, which some see as undefinable because definitions tend to be uncomfortable since they seem so often to impose characteristics on someone’s terms, and that someone provides a dominant framework that can impose conformity.85 The assumption that the ‘cosmopolitan’ is either being dominated by someone else’s ‘culture’ (without anyone having the ability, or ‘agency’ as some would have it, to make informed or even partially informed choices), or is ‘rootless’, makes a number of essentialising assumptions about ‘culture’. The usefulness of the (usually externally imposed) category ‘cosmopolitan’ is then reduced or demolished by an attempt to give it cultural content, rather than flexibility, and also to route it necessarily via the national. It is of course perfectly possible for someone to be at home in the world, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘transnational’ in habitus, movements, social connections, and at the same time a nationalist; this would apply equally to historians and their subjects of study.86 But whether this is a contradiction or 83 There is a muddiness in attempts by historians to describe what they are doing in using these categories: see CA Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: on Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111 (December 2006), pp 1440–1464. 84 See Zachariah, After the Last Post, pp. 21–47. 85 Sheldon Pollock, Homi K Bhabha, Carol A Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty express this fear in ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, in Carol A Breckenridge et al (ed), Cosmopolitanism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp 1–14. 86 There appears to be some kind of panic that sets in when a historian leaves behind the safety of the ‘national’: see the remarks in Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p 6: ‘I am acutely aware that it is – as yet – impossible to radically displace the nation as the locus of history, if for no other reason than that our values, whether as historians or individuals, have been intimately shaped by the nation-state’. And he disagrees that ‘nations are nothing but retrospective constructions to serve present needs’ or are ‘a radical discontinuity with the past’ (p 51). Having values conditioned by the ‘nation-state’ that one cannot adequately question: is this an admission of the necessary failure of attempts at self-reflexivity? There is something in these statements that deconstructs Duara’s own arguments at their moment of construction: ‘we may view the histories of nations as contingently as nations are themselves contingent’ (p 16); and yet . . . See Paul Gilroy, Between camps: nations, cultures and the allure of race (London: Routledge, 2004); Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), for a more consistent set of positions.

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Introduction

a necessary condition depends on how subtly or crudely one uses one’s etic terminology, recognising it to be etic. A neglected candidate at the moment seems to be ‘internationalism’. The term is also problematic: it has come to mean something related to states’ relations with one another, whereas it was once invoked for solidarities that disregarded the interests of states and strove for unity and solidarity of a different kind, the proletarian internationalism of the pre-First World War world being paradigmatic in this regard, even if it was more aspirational than real. How can these frameworks be different, except perhaps in scale, from a nationalism? And do any of these proferred terminological alternatives provide adequate conceptual alternatives?

Chapter 1 Historiography For some reason, despite it being a long-standing project for many historians, there seems to be an immense difficulty in seeing beyond nationalism as a rubric for understanding Indian history, and indeed all history: intellectuals, even when critical, tend to reify the nation, reaching implicitly for the safety of national paradigms. It is, therefore, essential to understand the theoretical and historiographical backgrounds to the (re)production of nationalist historical narratives. The once-invoked alternative to national(ist) histories, the self-consciously internationalist category of ‘class’, was, in the eyes of historians, battered and broken first by the practical failures of proletarian internationalism and internationalist solidarity in the First World War and the interwar period,1 and then on the rocks of the ‘culturalism’ that implicitly informs the ‘national’ today, in part via the widely admired (not least by historians of India)2 work on ‘English’ working-classness and plebeian consciousnesses of E. P. Thompson.3 If class 1 Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto suggest that the working class will have to settle accounts with its own ‘national bourgeouisies’ as a first step towards internationalism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm accessed 28.01.2020. The ‘national question’, however, is not well developed in Marx and Engels’ writing; those arguments are left to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg later. In this early writing, ‘national’ is a relatively imprecise category: ‘The outrages committed by the revolted sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable – such as one is prepared to meet only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion . . . However infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India . . .’. Karl Marx, ‘The Indian Revolt’, New York Daily Tribune, 16 September 1857 (written 4 September); reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, repr. 1974), pp. 152–155; the quote is from p 152. Here ‘races’, ‘religion’ and ‘nationalities’ are comparably productive of ‘hideous’ and ‘appalling’ outrages, but no particular attempt is made to distinguish them. 2 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The relevance of EP Thompson’, in Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 50–81. 3 EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964) [1963]. Thompson himself probably did not think he was preparing the transition: ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-002

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can historically be seen to be so rooted in specific ‘national’ (or perhaps merely parochial) characteristics and practices as to be useless as a potential axis of international (that is, trans-state: we have noted the problem of our day-to-day language that is rooted in national paradigms) solidarity, we may be thrown back on ‘culture’ and ‘identities’ that could all too easily lead us back to the ‘nation’. (We might wish to mention, however, that an ‘internationalism’ of historians abjuring the framework of national histories is a poor substitute for an internationalism of working class solidarities.) But as I have suggested earlier, perhaps this ought not to be the case: ‘culture’ and ‘identities’ will not always lead, and have not historically always led people to the ‘nation’; when they have, they have often been disciplined to do so. The question of who does this disciplining must be asked here: lest we need reminding, ‘nationalism’ is a set of ideas that masquerades as being inclusive of all the people within a given or potential state,4 but is in fact the ideology of a rather more limited set of people within that imagined (potential) state. There is a tendency with some intellectuals to produce a strong disavowal of nationalism alongside a reproduction of nationalism in the name of that disavowal. So many writers seem to return to a question of the inevitability, and ultimately the (instrumental) desirability of the ‘nation’ that it is a moot point whether their own loyalties reside in particular ‘nations’ or indeed in a world of nations that is in some senses a necessary or inevitable outcome of the telos of ‘modernity’, ‘liberalism’ or some larger and often mysterious historical process. The questions that need to be centred in response to these tendencies, especially in those arguments that speak for ‘national liberation movements’, is this: is the ‘nation’ the necessary or only route to freedom? Or does the category ‘nation’ itself have the capacity to discipline and oppress even those whose liberation it claims to speak for? The two are not necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive. ‘Freedom’, here, could mean the freedom to develop relations of exploitation; it must result in unfreedom. Here indeed is one of the paradoxes of a concept that emerged in the heyday of political liberalism, that nineteenth century progressive force that brought with it the celebration of the individual: it would seem that individual

ideas and institutional forms’ (pp 9–10). This being the case, ‘class-consciousness’ when ‘handled in cultural terms’ can be quite parochial, and ‘communal’ in both the Indian and the more general sense of the word. 4 This is Ernest Gellner’s minimalist definition in Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p 1. It is also used by Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) [1990], pp. 9: nationalism is an ideology that aims at the congruence of nations and states.

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liberty must be achieved – and sustained – collectively, as a ‘nation’. Does this bring us to the limits of the liberal mythologies of the individual and of individual freedom? (We are here, of course, separating strongly the question of what we might, as intellectuals, consider desirable from what is important to people in specific historical contexts: the impetus for a book such as this, after all, comes from the historical importance of perceptions of nationalism, or of identities that have been disciplined into nationalism.) Some of the recent material that attempts to decentre the nation actually does not do so. In one instance, a nuanced and apt description of the problems with many historians’ ‘methodological nationalism’ is then followed by a demonstration of how the ‘nation’ is produced.5 Another set of apparent solutions suggests the formulation ‘many nationalisms’; it is not clear why the national is then essential to hold on to as a really existing sentiment, and why the obvious point of its importance as the central legitimating category in international (again, to clarify, this actually means inter-state) affairs is not highlighted instead. Must we call all human collectivities ‘nations’ out of a misplaced respect for their subjectivities? Might it not be more useful to show the disciplining potential of the category ‘nation’, and its violence upon non-conformity, nonbelonging?

1 Imaginings, Inventions, Intuitions: Thinking about Nationalism Since the 1980s Could it be that the theorists of nationalism in the last two decades of the twentieth century almost found their way to a state of liberation from nationalist paradigms? Influential views by the 1980s stated the invented and imagined nature of nationalisms (though nonetheless real in their effects), dissolving the large claims to ancient cultural continuities rediscovered and reasserted in modern times as the awakening to consciousness of nations that had so long held the field: the image of the ‘noble and puissant nation rousing herself’ was being undermined.6 This came in part as a result of the (re)focusing on the class character of nationalisms: the importance of nationalism for the bourgeoisie’s consolidation of its authority, claimed on the basis of a supposedly all-

5 Manu Goswami, Producing India: from colonial economy to national space (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), is keen on this term. 6 John Milton, Areopagitica: ‘Methinks I see in my mind, a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’. The gender ambiguity of the passage might be noted in passing.

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encompassing and inclusive category, that of the nation.7 (For some, this was simply a part of the arrogant universalising of oppressive categories that was characteristic of ‘the Enlightenment’, which itself became a somewhat reified category; others saw clearly the romantic roots of some – and perhaps late – formulations of nationalism. This again provided something of a basis for the dichotomy between so-called ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms, of which the paradigmatic examples were France and Germany respectively; inter alia, the Dreyfus affair and the rise of French fascism demonstrated the limitations of civic belonging.8 The story of the ‘overseas Frenchman’ further problematises this legend: as Fanon put it, he grew up a Frenchman in Martinique, and it was in France that he discovered he was a Negro.9 But again we are getting ahead of the story.) The sleight of hand that allowed the bourgeoisie to include ‘the people’ as a whole was noted, as nationalism was, so the argument went, centrally used to create spaces (and markets) within which the bourgeoisie consolidated their authority.10 Nationalisms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ‘progressive’, in the language of the left, because they broke up the unities of empires and challenged the authority of absolute monarchs in the name of the sovereignty of the people. So far this was a paean to the uses of nationalism, and thus its progressive nature, at least in its nineteenth century context. Nationalism was to absolutism and empires in Europe what imperialism was, in Marx’s early formulation, to Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production: it would bring forth capitalism, famously celebrated in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere.11 These were arguments regarding the uses or effects of nationalism; they said very little about the origins or content of particular nationalisms, except

7 EJ Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780; EJ Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: the making of modern English society, 1750 to the present day (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968). 8 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), among others, (pp. 47–48), quite correctly rejects the civic versus ethnic nationalism distinction. 9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967) [1952]. 10 This is the position taken in Lenin’s treatment of the problem in 1914: see The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/index.htm, accessed 19.08.2019. 11 Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853, reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, repr. 1974), pp. 30–39. See also Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which still remains one of the most powerful celebrations of the creative and progressive powers of capitalism.

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when locating their origins in specific experiences or events. The strength of Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation that nations are ‘imagined communities’ was that it did not assume any specific content to nationalisms.12 In this sense, the strength of the book was more in its title than its contents. (A potential problem with the formulation ‘community’ was not subject to scrutiny: ‘community’ tends to have connotations of organicism in much writing as well as in everyday use, whereas many communities can be shown to be coerced.) A sense of nation-ness was simply there because it was imagined to be there. But the formulation may have been at its best as well as run up against its limits there. The modular forms ‘available for piracy’ that Anderson then lends to future historians are evocative and sometimes insightful; but the implied descriptive capacity of taking in all or most formulations of ‘nation-ness’, or the predictive capacity as to how nations might be imagined in fact undermines the usefulness of the central insight. The looseness and flexibility of a phrase that invokes the capacity of nation-ness to be imagined in a variety of ways that emerge plausibly in given historical and social contexts cannot be contained, for instance, in a formulation that sees the nation as replacing religiouslyimagined communities.13 The exact place of religious, denominational or – more problematically – religious/cultural solidarities in various forms of nationalism has yet to be worked out. It is doubtful whether this can be successfully worked out in general, as opposed to in specific contexts. The influential volume by Hobsbawm and Ranger on the ‘invention of tradition’ demonstrated that not everything that claimed to be long-standing and traditional was in fact so. The argument distinguished between custom and tradition, the latter being that which was over-valorised and appropriated for political causes, the former simply what was done. The editors somewhat diluted the argument, however, by suggesting that not all traditions were invented,14 thereby allowing for the continued existence of a space to reclaim some

12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s later work is far less engaged with among historians of South Asia: his collection of essays, Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), and Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005). Both are marked by an insistence on the centrality of nationalism (or even ‘the goodness of nations’: The Spectre of Comparison, pp 360–368); the latter is revealing of what might be called the internationalism of nationalism, and might be relevant for South Asianists, who are still prone to accepting national claims to uniqueness, indigenism and authenticity. 13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 22. 14 EJ Hobsbawm and TO Ranger (ed), The invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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traditions as fake and others as authentic. In fact the category of authenticity escaped being problematised. Meanwhile, in a twist to the plot that had relatively few resonances as far as scholarship on India was concerned, A. D. Smith came up with his category of ‘ethnies’: by this time everyone thought of nationalism as an invention rather than something authentic, but Smith reintroduced a ‘real’ basis for the invention of a nation: the so-called ‘ethnie’, based on ethnicity.15 He insisted on ‘the continuing appeal of national identity through their rootedness in pre-modern ethnic symbolism and modes of organisation’.16 He accepted that the national state ‘draws its power and sustenance from the dominant ethnie around which it was formed and which it in turn helped to coalesce and crystallise.’17 At the same time he pointed out that ‘the need to demonstrate the possession of a unique, authentic and adequate cultural heritage and ethnic past, one which will bear comparison with those of other nations’, was a characteristic of all self-proclaimed nationalist intellectuals.18 This seems to take him again into an invention-and-construction argument; but he insisted that the nation is historically embedded. It is the modern heir and transformation of the much older and commoner ethnie and as such gathers to itself all the symbols and myths of premodern ethnicity. Combining these pre-modern ties and sentiments with the explosive modern charge of popular sovereignty and mass, public culture, nationalism has created a unique modern drama of national liberation and popular mobilisation in an ancestral homeland.19

This, again, was a bit circular: if ‘nations’ could be imagined variously in given historical contexts, why was it that a somewhat essentialised race-based category (or is ethnie somehow distinguishable from race?) was being called upon to form an ‘objective’ basis for ‘nations’? Once again, the undefinable was being defined in terms of another undefinable, and a pre-existing one that was old, yet powerless until ‘mobilised’ in the ‘nation’. If nations were based on ethnies, but ethnies were simply felt or invented, then we were back to square one in a somewhat pointless intervention that, if it had any strengths at all, implied that not all imaginings of a ‘nation’ would necessarily be plausible imaginings which would command any loyalty. This, one might add, was something that

15 AD Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995; reprint: 1996), and much earlier and later work by him. 16 AD Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, p 6. 17 AD Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, p 114. 18 AD Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, p 67. 19 AD Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, p 157.

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was known already. In his favour, it could be said that one could multiply examples of conflicts in Africa or the former Yugoslavia to belabour the point that ‘nations’ were being defined ethnically;20 the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, once it caught on (was it already coined for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in the 1980s?), added weight to the argument that ‘nations’ were ‘ethnically’ constructed. However, here again the question of whether, why and when, ‘ethnicity’ itself was constructed, was not placed in the foreground: as an early critic of the argument pointed out, ‘ethnicity and nationalism are not “givens”, but are social and political constructions’; they are ‘modern phenomena inseparably connected with the activities of the modern centralising state’ . . . ‘creations of elites, who draw upon, distort, and sometimes fabricate materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent’.21 In particular, ‘the conversion of cultural differences into bases for political differentiation between peoples arises only under specific circumstances which need to be identified clearly’; and the role of the relationships between elites and the state need to be centrally examined in this regard.22 The long-standing debates in India as to the constructed nature of the apparently natural divisions of society, in particular the amplification of caste and the more explicit divide-and-rule tactics to separate Hindus and Muslims by the British provided the vaccination against such theories as Smith’s, at least in academic circles.23 As far as the ‘ethnic origins’ of nations was concerned, however, international relations theorists took this on board and it became a fundamental truth about the world, at times slightly qualified (a qualification that cannot always, or altogether, be blamed on Smith): ‘backward’ peoples, or ‘backward’ nations, had ethnically defined nationalisms, and played out their ‘ancient hatreds’ in perpetual conflict.24 Among the bastard children of such theories are included, one

20 Indeed, Smith invoked Yugoslavia in his Preface to Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, but then declared that he would not deal with that subject in his book; and he kept his promise. 21 Paul Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991), p 8. 22 Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism, p 13. 23 Genealogically, this argument owes much to Bernard Cohn’s article, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, reprinted in An Anthropologist Among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–254; this is amplified later, for instance in Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). All of this is contra Louis Dumont’s once influential argument in his Homo Hierarchicus (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970) [1966], where that is his term for ‘eastern man’ as opposed to ‘western man’. 24 Michael Billig, in Banal Nationalism, pointed out that the established ‘nations’ don’t have their nationalism questioned so much as the peripheral ones: ‘In both popular and academic

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might argue, Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis.25 Civilisations can be seen as meta-nations, and as some critics pointed out, must act as and through states in order to express their will. But Huntington takes this a step further: Western institutions and practices, rather than white people per se, are the custodians of desirable civilisational values; it follows then that ‘multi-culturalism’, which dilutes those institutions and practices, is a terrible threat to ‘Western civilisation’, which must of course win.26 The consequences of this view are being played out in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. One might spot another reified category somewhere: ‘Western’. No amount of intellectual critique is able to kill this beast, or its corollary, ‘Eastern’. Aligned behind these essentialised meta-nations are protagonists of the two-legs-bad, four-legs-good (or vice versa) style of politics.27 One might detect certain patterns that have crept up unnoticed: arguments about the uses or potential uses of nationalism merge or get confused with arguments about the origins of (some existing forms of) nationalism and therefore by extension the predictability of forms and patterns taken by nationalisms. And arguments about origins and uses are intermingled with assumptions about the desirability of nationalism: much of the ‘construction’ argument sees nationalism as an inevitable and logical outcome of historical processes that are necessary and desirable.

writing, nationalism is associated with those who struggle to create new states or with extreme right-wing politics.’ (p. 5). Billig’s point is to draw attention to the ‘unwaved flag’ of the ‘established’ ‘nations’, whose nationalisms are, he believes, more dangerous because they are not taken seriously enough, since they are hegemonic (pp. 10, 39–43). Billig of course is speaking from a metropolitan perspective, where he argues that the problem of nationalism is seen as elsewhere. He also closely associates the two categories of creating new states and extreme right-wing politics, though he attributes this to critics of nationalisms elsewhere. Those who write on ‘national liberation movements’ from a peripheral perspective separate the two, and often fail to see the latter even when it is present in the former. 25 Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 26 Samuel P Huntington, Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 27 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) might have been said to both attack and perpetuate the dichotomy, in part due to the book’s own inconsistencies, in which he traces back ‘Europe’s perceptions of the East’ to ancient Greece, which of course is part of Eurocentric myths of Europe’s own origins.

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2 Bringing it All Back ‘Home’ Indian contributions to the debate on the origins and nature of nationalism were often (un?)surprisingly nationalistic. At the core of it appeared to be a need for a unique and distinct national identity that could not be reduced to being merely invented. In The Nation and its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee objected to Indians being reduced to the role of ‘perpetual consumers of modernity’.28 (This, it might be said, was based on a reading of Benedict Anderson that was not quite in the spirit of Anderson’s own intervention, and was somewhat polemical).29 Chatterjee’s work sought to show that Indians were not simply imitative, but actively interpreting and reinterpreting the national in the light of a specific and different modernity (this is an unproblematic approach that did not necessarily require the polemic). In fact, responses to Chatterjee’s own (earlier) work seemed to send out the signal that he had not been nationalist enough: Indian nationalist thought was ‘derivative but different’, and arrived at similar conclusions to other nationalisms via a ‘crooked line’ that was a consequence of engagements with the national via colonialism.30 To many Indian nationalist writers, this ‘crooked line’, this ‘derivative discourse’ was not good enough. Chatterjee, of course, was less exceptionalist in this work than in later works.31 Nevertheless, reading Fragments today can take a reader a long way towards the critique of Third Worldist nationalisms that most writers shy away from, Chatterjee perhaps included.32 The explicitly indigenist strand, represented for instance by Ashis Nandy, makes a strange manoeuvre. Nandy in particular is concerned with the inauthenticity of Indians who speak in the political language of the ‘West’: secularism,

28 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–13. 29 This is pointed out by Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 129–131. 30 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 31 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Talking about our modernity in two languages’, in Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 263–85; Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity, published lecture (Rotterdam/Dakar: Sephis, 1997); (Srijnan Halder Memorial Lecture, 1994 delivered in Bengali in Calcutta, 3 September 1994, translated by himself). 32 See in particular the sections on caste, and on women: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 116–157, 173–199.

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modernity, nationalism, etc.33 In The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Nandy casts nationalism, through his reading of Rabindranath Tagore, as a form of western knowledge irrelevant for India,34 and in the spirit of his Intimate Enemy and other works in which the adoption of ‘western’ modes of thought de-authenticise India(ns) – we should note the ‘authenticity’ trope – claims, in a paradoxically exceptionalist manoeuvre, that Tagore’s rejection of nationalisms was a more authentically Indian position. This is a strange and somewhat mystical-east argument that seems to be nationalist at one remove, though it might avoid the name nationalism.35 In a later manoeuvre, Nandy attempts to separate ‘nationalism’ from ‘patriotism’, claiming the latter as a positive category (and a non-‘Western’ one) and as distinct from the former.36 Nandy relies on the ‘eastern’ versus ‘western’ dichotomy that is mutually reinforcing, and seems to ignore the debates on the contingency of identities that were going on around him, even as he was able elsewhere to participate in those debates. He was not alone in this: the anxieties about the derivative and ‘Western’ nature of Indian political languages of legitimation, emerging in the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of the Hindutva challenge and its attempt to claim authenticity, elicited a response from several writers, in part along the lines of the reclaiming of an ‘indigenous’ that was not Hindu fundamentalist and genocidal, and on the basis that ‘Nehruvian secularism’ or ‘Westernised ideas’ and so on were not ‘rooted’ enough in ‘Indian traditions’ to be appealing to ‘ordinary people’ – not a million miles away from Hindutva positions on the ‘pseudo-secularism’ of Indian ‘leftist’ intellectuals. This gave rise to a spectacular non-debate in which the term ‘secularism’ was dissected from various perspectives, in part to show that ‘even’ in the ‘West’, people were not entirely ‘secular’. Views diverged from there on to ask whether there was a special kind

33 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Political Culture of the Indian State’, Daedalus, Vol. 118, No. 4, (Fall, 1989), pp. 1–26. 34 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 35 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: essays in the politics of awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); see also Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 36 Ashis Nandy, ‘Nationalisms Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Post-Nationalist Strains’, Economic and Politicial Weekly, August 13, 2006, pp. 3500–3504. This quibbling about names and name-calling does not get us very far, unless we wish to enter into an etymological dispute about patrie and natio in addition to substantive questions about whether his distinction makes contemporaneous sense, let alone retrospective.

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of ‘secularism’ suited to India, a ‘secular common sense’,37 or whether (invoking Gandhi) a spiritual society is not suited to secular values. The debate around the ‘communal’ and the ‘secular’ opened the way to an important modification of terms: if one refuses to accept that there is, unproblematically, a ‘secular’ as opposed to a ‘communal’ position,38 how does one justify delegitimising a ‘religious nationalism’?39 There is nothing a priori absurd about a religious basis for national claims, Benedict Anderson’s rather static and Eurocentric model of the secular nation (France?) replacing religiously-imagined communities (Latin Christendom) notwithstanding.40 Nevertheless, in this debate, the conflict around the subject of ‘authenticity’ was not to be surrendered. ‘Hybridity’ could not be celebrated or embraced:41 the conflict was for the right to represent India, to come across as the authentically national (or properly ‘patriotic’, which is allegedly different and not so tainted by the ‘Western’),42 to contest definitions of the nation that were, in the opinion of some, very damaging. Sumit Sarkar’s Beyond Nationalist Frames states the need for a sustained critique of nationalism, but goes on to state that existing critiques are based on a ‘colonialist discourse/indigenous authenticity binary’ that objects to modern

37 Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001). 38 The best way into this material is via Rajeev Bhargava (ed), Secularism and its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). The main protagonist on the side of the anti-‘secularists’ was TN Madan, Modern myths, locked minds: secularism and fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); TN Madan, ‘Secularism in its Place’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Nov., 1987), pp. 747–759. Since the problem of the state’s ‘secular’ position is usually pragmatically solved by keeping the state out of religious affairs, this debate seemed sometimes a little strange. Over time, with writing on the limitations of the ‘secularisation’ paradigm, the debate died down. To my mind, much of it was actually about finding a coherent and tolerant Indian nationalism; what it revealed was that nationalism is a form of sectarianism, as ‘communalisms’ are forms of nationalism too, and a sectarianism endorsed by potential or actual state power is a nationalism. 39 The term was introduced into South Asian debates in the 1990s: see for instance Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Van der Veer also contributed to the ‘secularism’ debates, by way of an ending of the ‘west-east’ polemic: see Peter van der Veer, Imperial encounters: religion and modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 40 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 41 Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 42 Nandy, ‘Nationalisms Genuine and Spurious’ and CA Bayly, The Origins of Nationality: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) make the same distinction between patriotisms and nationalisms, though they use them differently.

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nationalism because it emanates from the West.43 In Sarkar’s work, the importance of ‘anti-colonial struggles’ is acknowledged, but anticolonialism is then conflated with nationalism. ‘There remains a need to make distinctions between different kinds of “nation-state” projects, with specific contours and locations in time.’44 An important part of this, for Sarkar, is the continued attempt to distinguish a good, secular, nation-state project from a bad, anti- or non-secular one: ‘The Hindu Right is much more than just another, particularly unpleasant, “nation-state” project, and I have little patience with efforts to collapse critiques of it into a generalised rejection of “Western modernity”.’45 But how many serious critiques of the nationalism of the Hindu Right have based themselves on the argument that the Hindutva project is an aspect of ‘Western modernity’, and how many academics still conflate the ‘Western’ and the ‘modern’? Sarkar is not clear enough in his characterisations of his opponents here. He presents his own position with more clarity: ‘Being more conventionally “secular”, in the predominant Indian sense of non- or anti-communal, has often involved immersion in a language of “national” unity as the supreme value, “integration”, independent development along technocratic-statist lines.’46 The suggestion is that despite the problematic nature of the national as a supreme value, it is at least non- or anticommunal. But is this ‘national’ any more than where one draws the boundaries, conceptual or physical? Is a ‘communalism’ anything more than a ‘nationalism’ with the wrong ‘national’ unit? Sarkar identifies a need to go beyond culturalist or statist nationalisms towards ‘socially radical and internationalist values appropriate to our vastly transformed times.’47 This may be useful; and seems to imply a rejection of ‘national frames’ all right; but it also seems to require endorsing some earlier uses of the national in a less critical manner, in a stageist argument that is part of many Marxist readings of nationalism. In some respects still situated within the postcolonialist/postmodernist-versus-materialist polemics of the 1990s historiography of South Asia, which can perhaps be more aptly described as a Bengali academic civil war performed on a world stage, Sarkar takes a few tentative steps towards discarding ‘national frames’, but it is doubtful whether he really manages to get ‘beyond’ them.

43 Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), pp. 2–3. 44 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, p 3. He may be referring to Nandy in particular, and to some aspects of Partha Chatterjee’s work. But in these passages, he does not do justice to his opponents’ arguments. 45 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, p 8. 46 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, p 8. 47 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, p. 8.

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In all of this, the debates missed quite a few tricks that were readily available contemporaneously. Potential borrowing from those who came to be called postfeminist – for instance, the insight that the category ‘women’ could itself be a reification and a disciplining into being, and that even in the claim to liberating women, forms of classification could imprison and impose roles48 – were not brought into the debates. And if identities and community roles were to be considered fluid, non-fixed, changing, politically responsive – as they were in writing on Hindus and Muslims, or on caste roles and identities49 – why did this not apply to the ‘national’? Did the relative marginalisation of the approach which held ‘class’ as a category that potentially fractured both ‘nation’ and ‘community’ (even as ‘class’ was itself a fluid category), obstruct ways of thinking about collectivities outside the framework of the ‘nation’ as an obligatory collectivity? Were there debates on state and civil society, for instance, that could have brought forth more pointed questions about the role of the ‘nation’?50 Is the ‘nation’ where the state and civil society cooperate? Or fuse? What is ‘civil society’ anyway? We still see in many of the debates the confusion of nation and state, which Partha Chatterjee pointed out so skilfully in connection with the Nehruvian elite:51 but in that instance, at least, the blurring of the distinction was deliberate and instrumental.

3 The International Dimensions of Insularity It might help to try and step back from these specifics and to situate the nationalist imperative in these debates in the wider context of Indian historiography and its politics. In this swift narrative of historiographical trends, it must be acknowledged that the historians who I have lumped together as the ‘old’ and ‘new’ mainstreams would object strongly to being so lumped; and differences among them are, in particular debates, extremely relevant. However, in terms of a general mapping of positions and their consequences for the politics of

48 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p 9, for a clear statement of the problem. 49 See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, protest and identity in colonial India: the Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997). 50 See Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (ed), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); see, on Bengal, Partha Chatterjee, ‘On Civil and Political Society in Postcolonial Democracies’, pp 165–178, and once again based on a ‘west-east’ schema. 51 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp. 200–219.

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historiographical production – a theme we need to keep in mind – these distinctions that I have drawn here do not to my mind do a great injustice to their work. This somewhat simplified picture might also serve as a reminder for those who are familiar with these debates, and provide a metanarrative to question. There has, it must be pointed out, long been an anxiety relating to a historiography whose agenda has to a large extent been imposed from the outside: before independence by explicitly colonial paradigms, buttressed, in a circularity of material, by Weberian arguments that Max Weber himself built up by using material produced by colonial administrators and would-be scholars,52 and thereafter (often still in Weberian mode) by theories of ‘backwardness’ or ‘modernisation’. This stems from the political asymmetry of centre-periphery relationships: central debates often remain debates imposed by outside agendas. Assumptions that are made about the peripheral societies – ‘peoples’ inexorably and irrevocably divided into ‘communities’ rather than relating to each other as ‘individuals’, and without any class characteristics – begin to dominate historiographical production, and much energy has been expended on exploding these stereotypes, historicising and qualifying them, before other agendas could be set. The complaint, therefore, that History itself was a Western/European mode of domination was, 25 or 30 years ago, only a slight exaggeration, although some who made that complaint seemed to be implying that History was a more pernicious form of domination than British rule had been.53 In India, the historical establishment from the time of ‘independence’ – formal decolonisation – in 1947 was overwhelmingly dominated by left-of-centre readings, but tended nonetheless to be ‘nationalist’. This was in contrast to historiography on India from Britain, which still worked within imperialist paradigms, suitably tempered for the times. Indian political ‘progress’ towards a ‘modern’ ‘nation’ were gifts of the imperial civilising mission, which admittedly had an ugly side but was on the whole progressive. History was a national project; historians who studied in Britain were careful to restate their nationalist credentials when they returned to work in India. (A third centre, the United States, had not yet acquired the same emotive involvement in the historiographical consciousness in the immediate post-independence period.) ‘Mainstream’ historians, many 52 Max Weber, ‘India: the Brahmin and the Castes’ [1916], and Max Weber, ‘The Chinese Literati’, in HH Gerth and C Wright Mills (ed & transl), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (new edn, London: Routledge, 1991), pp 396–415 and pp 416–444 respectively. 53 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations 37 (Winter 1992), pp. 1–26.

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of them accommodated within Government-sponsored Research Councils, ‘did’ Nationalist History: the early years were spent documenting the heroics of the (nationalist) struggle against imperialism, and defending the nationalists against claims of narrow self-interest, regional or upper-caste/class chauvinism (levelled against them, from the 1960s, inter alia by the so-called ‘Cambridge School’).54 This ‘mainstream’ had itself been culled from a wider range of historians pre-1947, many of whom tended to identify the ‘Indian’ nation with ‘Hindu’ religion/culture, explicitly or implicitly. In the interests of a secular, left-leaning democracy (the definition adopted by the Nehruvian state),55 the more overtly sectarian and anti-Muslim of such historians (who traced ‘Indian’ cultural decline from the time of the ‘Islamic conquest’ of India) were ostracised. The ‘mainstream’ still contained, however, conservative historians who explicitly or implicitly regarded the ‘national’ entity as a ‘Hindu’ one in which sectarian voices were by definition Muslim ones: a sectarian majority can hide in a majoritarian ethic.56 But these were men whose best days were often behind them, and the next generation of ‘Hindu’ ideologues found themselves largely without historians who could speak for them from legitimate platforms. The historiographical trend that proved most assimilable to the new state’s need for a ‘secular’ view of the ‘nation’ was a nationalist-tinged Marxism, most often to the left of the Nehruvian state’s proclaimed ideology, but nevertheless prepared to ally with the publicly proclaimed ideals of that state, which were considered more progressive and positive than its practices. If historicised, this

54 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); JA Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal (ed), Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870 to 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), etc. 55 This is obviously a shorthand expression that defers further discussion, for which, see Chapter Five. See also Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004), ‘Interlude: Envisioning the New India’, pp 139–168. 56 Prominent among them was one Romesh Chandra Majumdar, who wrote and published a great deal. There was also the institution of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, allegedly a publisher and disseminator of educational and cultural material, sponsored by the Birla family of industrialists (renowned also for their earlier patronage of Madan Mohan Malaviya and the Benares Hindu University group, which of course was connected closely to Hindu sectarian opinion and the Hindu Sabha, as well as for GD Birla’s closeness to Gandhi). See Medha Malik Kudaisya, The Life and Times of GD Birla (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). For those who wish to draw a clear line between ‘communalists’ and ‘secular nationalists’, it might be pointed out that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari wrote for the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on ‘Hindu’ themes.

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historiography can be seen as a product of the political struggle in which Marxists were allies of the nationalists against imperialism, and were therefore effectively nationalists themselves. This hangover has lasted well into the postindependence period, and has had historiographical as well as political consequences.57 Among the latter consequences were many communists’ implicit support for the governments and politics of Jawaharlal Nehru, where the Nehruvians were the lesser evil in comparison to the other political forces at large;58 the legacy of this loyalty was partially inherited by the post-Nehru and rather different version of the Indian National Congress led by his daughter Indira Gandhi.59 The ‘nationalist-Marxists’ also wrote about nationalism, but were less concerned with how nationalism was defined than with how it involved itself in struggle: how nationalists led the ‘masses’. The evasive answer to the question of what Indian nationalism consisted of was provided by the typical slogan of schoolbook history: ‘unity in diversity’. India, according to this argument, had always had an ability to assimilate all that entered its boundaries.60 Religion or other ‘identity’ questions were largely irrelevant: and there was a consistent distinction between a ‘true’ nationalism – directed against the British – and a ‘communalism’, which was a false nationalism that directed its aggressions against fellow-Indians who happened to be of a different religion – or ‘community’.61 In conflating past and present nationalisms, as well as anticolonialism and nationalism, such historians failed to address the anomaly of needing the British to retain the role of the Other that defined the Self, well after the end of formal colonial rule.62

57 Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966); Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class 1920–1947 (Delhi, 2002), which despite its late date of publication was actually based largely on work done in the 1980s. 58 Zachariah, Nehru, passim. 59 It would be perhaps adequate to raise the question as to which academics, self-proclaimed communists, or academic communists supported Indira Gandhi’s Emergency from 1975 to 1977. 60 This was the formulation in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (London: Signet, 1946). See Chapter Five. 61 Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1984); Bipan Chandra et al, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988); T Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 62 There is a remark by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002) (1938), in response to the Stalinist purges, on what the Soviet Union would do after it ran out of bourgeois to be against, that appears to be quite apt in this context.

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Even when class struggle, trade-union activity, strikes and peasant movements were written about, the nationalist movement was seldom decentred. The deferral of socialism to the post-independence period that was the agreed coalitional strategy of the pre-1947 years was defended. Under this consensus, the left-leaning, but never properly socialist, orientation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s government could be defended as the best of all possible worlds in current conditions; and as ‘neo-colonialism’ came to be recognised as the new enemy, difficult questions about internal politics were externalised. This was simplified by the fact that then, as now, most historians never crossed the chronological barrier of 1947. History happened before that; mere politics took place afterwards. Moreover, the history of precolonial times was written up according to the concerns generated by colonialism and by the nationalist movement.63 By the 1970s, histories of movements of ordinary people had begun to be written, sometimes by participants in radical movements or by those close to them.64 In the early 1980s, this trend was given a formal academic framework. A group of historians launched an attack on the existing historiography of South Asia: nationalist histories told a tale of nationalist heroes leading the masses to victory; imperialist histories told a tale of ‘England’s work in India’, with modern nationhood as a British gift; and even Marxists tended to talk of left-wing struggles as if only the leaders counted and the led simply obediently followed. What was missing was the ‘politics of the people’. Influenced by the ‘histories from below’ of the British Marxists, and of E. P. Thompson in particular, and armed with selections from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the ‘subaltern studies’ group began a quest to find subaltern agency, an ‘autonomous domain’ of subaltern activity; to restore to the subaltern his [still ‘his’] own voice.65 The subaltern was defined negatively and relationally: he [she, eventually] was not elite; and elite in one context might be subaltern in another – nevertheless, ‘subaltern’ was assumed to mean marginal, downtrodden people.66

63 Does this tendency still survive? See e.g. Irfan Habib (ed), India: Studies in the History of an Idea (Delhi: Munshiram, 2007). 64 See for instance Sunil Sen, Agrarian struggle in Bengal, 1946–47 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972). 65 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–8. 66 David Arnold, ‘Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies (1984) 11, 4, pp. 155–177.

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The driving concerns of the project were broadly Marxist; they rebelled against a doctrinaire, economistic version of Marxism, and sought, as Gramsci had recommended for the Italian peasantry, to understand how the subaltern mind worked. There was, initially, and despite their best efforts, a residual nationalism in what they wrote: as Sumit Sarkar and others have by now pointed out, Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies manifesto sought to find the contributions of the subaltern to the nationalist movement.67 There might also be an interesting parallel to the Subaltern Studies movement’s beginnings and the writings of Gramsci: many of the former had been involved with or inspired by the agrarian movements and student radicalism – broadly Maoist, in the sense that revolution was expected to arrive with a radicalised countryside surrounding the cities – of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This movement had been crushed by the state authorities under cover of war with Pakistan and the ‘liberation’ of Bangladesh by India in 1971, with many of the casualties being middle-class students. The peasantry had failed to live up to its radical potential. For the Subaltern Studies group, as for Gramsci, here was a moment of defeat that gave cause for reflection: why did the Italian peasantry support the Fascists? Who were these peasants anyway? The questions were suitably reformulated for India. The problem the Subaltern Studies group encountered was often one of sources: underprivileged groups could often only be traced in written records of elites or even of the coloniser. So it became necessary to read the existing records ‘against the grain’; to read what Guha called ‘the prose of counterinsurgency’, in which ordinary people appeared only as ‘insurgents’ and as ‘threats to law and order’, and to find the subaltern in this way.68 This led on to a good deal of text-criticism, to expose hidden assumptions in the sources, to examine what would come to be called ‘colonial discourse’. The 1980s had seen the beginnings of critiques of dominant perspectives through an understanding of ‘discourses’ – in the historiography of India, by the mid-1980s this had been supplemented by a reading of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (itself drawing on the Gramscian description of hegemony as well as Foucault’s conception of discourse as power-knowledge), and by Gayatri Chakrabarti Spivak’s intervention into Subaltern Studies when she argued that the subaltern could not speak except when – and therefore even when – mediated through the representations of well-meaning educated historians: her paraphrase

67 Guha, ‘On Some Aspects’. 68 Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 45–88.

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of Marx’s dictum, ‘sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden’.69 The ‘Vertreter’, the historian, could never fully find the authentic subaltern voice, let alone re-present it. This exploded the more ambitious claims of early subaltern studies. By the 1990s, the historiography of India entered the era of the hegemony of what can be called late Subaltern Studies, post-al addresses and the Great Schism. Indian scholarship had always had a tendency, especially in writing in English, to veer towards the high altitudes of current social theory in Europe: from colonial times, a need to be more current than current had driven Indian scholarship to seek legitimation from academic sources that their colonisers were forced to regard as valid. The resources of then-current post-1968 philosophical pessimism were brought to bear upon the problems of the ‘postcolony’. In a now familiar story, debates moved on to the subjectivities of ‘identity’, the false claims of the ‘Enlightenment’ to universalism, the ‘constructed’ (and in some readings the ‘Western’) nature of ‘history’ itself, and who had the right to represent – to speak for – whom.70 One of the consequences was a refocusing on the particularisms of South Asia (or in extreme forms, the Bengali Hindu upper-caste male). Veering towards ‘indigenism’ had once been considered the hallmark of the reactionary who was unable to distinguish between what was universally progressive and what was contingently imposed by the ‘West’. (The category ‘West’ was itself not properly questioned – even by Marxists). Now this began to shift. This gave rise to a problem. An attention to discourses of imperialism challenged existing conventions of representation, exposed their complicity with various forms of oppression and opened out a space that could potentially give a voice to minorities. However, in the course of the assault on ‘history’ and existing claims to ‘truth’, the spokespeople for the subalterns had undermined their right to make any hard claims. They could now only insist on attention to the particular, to the fragment, as against all grand narratives. (Marxism was one of the casualties of this process: it was a Eurocentric discourse – and, after Said, an Orientalist one.71)

69 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (ed), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313; Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (ed), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp 3–34. 70 Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality’. 71 Said, Orientalism, pp. 155 ff.

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The old ‘mainstream’ now accused the post-modern, post-colonial, subaltern studies side of scoring ‘same-side goals’.72 The latter were now, in many ways, the new ‘mainstream’, since they fit better into the agendas of North American academic debates, where the funding and the jobs were, increasingly, to be found. The Marxists among the old ‘mainstream’, including defectors from Subaltern Studies (the ‘old’ Subaltern Studies) accused the new ‘mainstream’ of neglecting their political duties and undermining the positions of those who did not neglect them: celebrating the ‘fragment’ and the particular undermined attempts to create solidarity on the basis of wider and more universal principles (the comparative dimension of course acknowledged the point being made about the imperfections of the universal).73 There was no epistemological basis remaining from which to make political arguments. There was a politics of postcodes involved in this: the importance of Metropolitan Location.74 The ‘old’ mainstream also accused the North America-based post-al of being more interested in the academic agendas of their chosen location than in the history of South Asia. New entrants to the field had to declare their allegiances clearly. Ironically, in this context it was relatively easier to be a nonIndian practitioner of ‘South Asian history’, because the locational factor became less emotionally charged (but this itself had its problems, and this also changed, as the next section outlines).75 All this took on a dimension that was more immediate than merely academic with the rise of the Hindu right in India from the 1980s. This was of course not intrinsically connected with the historical profession. And in much of their populist rhetoric, the right did not particularly care for the historical field (although they clearly took their inspiration from Fascist and Nazi history – Mein Kampf was readily available on street corners across North India from the mid-1980s, with Muslims standing in for Jews in their reading). But they were alive to the uses of history for different audiences, and to the need for institutional bases for this kind of history: the official Indian Council for Historical Research positions were quickly occupied in Hindutva’s period of political

72 Reported conversation between Rajat Kanta Ray and Dipesh Chakrabarty, c. 1994. 73 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, in Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 82–108. 74 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’, in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 159–220. 75 (In the other large space in ‘South Asia’, Pakistan, the discipline of history had not been given sufficient space for such agonised debates to emerge: access to archival material was enough of a struggle on its own).

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power, publications of document collections blocked (with the partial collusion of the publishers) and the old ‘mainstream’ hounded from their positions, to be replaced by persons of no professional standing. The Archaeological Survey of India started falsifying archaeological finds. School textbooks were rewritten to include what in an epistemologically less uncertain environment would be referred to as lies – as they were, in Parliament, by the opposition.76 This did not affect professionals in their dealing with fellow professionals: very few of the right-wing ideologues had enough intellectual sophistication to make an impact in terms of the standards of the discipline. But since a secular, broadly non-aligned and somewhat left-leaning reading of history had been seen as a necessary underpinning for a tolerant ‘national’ entity, which was to be placed in the service of a ‘secular’ state, professional historians and nonsectarian politicians alike became worried about the consequences for public debate. Since the high theoretical debates on the contingency of truth and the ‘constructed’ nature of History itself had reached ordinary people, if at all, as a complaint against ‘Western’-imposed and offensive readings of the Indian past, how could they be weaned away from right-wing readings that celebrated a völkisch, ‘pure’ past that needed to be returned to? But the old ‘mainstream’, now fighting a strong rearguard action, had to address and reformulate a problem that emerged: how far do the ‘facts’ of history need to conform to a desired political order? For instance, does the loss of a historiographical battle over a ‘secular’ reading of the Mughal Empire have to mean an acceptance of the Hindu right’s right to persecute Muslims, allegedly as retrospective revenge? How far must history (or readings of the past) provide justifications or positive normative examples for the present?

4 The Late Subalternist and the Politics of Representation We now need to shift focus to that sub-section of South Asian (in practice Indian) historiography that became central to defining debates within it: the Subaltern Studies project. The argument here traces the movement of that project from an initial position of trying to decentre the national, to claiming a version of the national that, as postcolonial intellectuals, they themselves possessed, on behalf of the ‘nation’, and could exercise on behalf of the postcolony and its people.

76 See Introduction.

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Not that there was nothing at the outset to suggest the presence of a residual nationalism. Ranajit Guha’s introduction to that project, as mentioned before, declared that the subaltern’s contribution to Indian nationalism had been ignored.77 Later on, the ‘insufficiently political’ character of subaltern consciousness (or at least of its elementary aspects) was discussed.78 Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, who had been concerned with the Italian peasantry’s non-class consciousness because it had supported the Fascists instead of the communists, the Subaltern Studies group looked for the truly national in the subaltern, as against the merely ‘bourgeois’ national that existed in/among the elite. (The resonances with Frantz Fanon’s search for a properly popular nationalism are striking.) If, as the group’s early Marxist training should have indicated, nationalism is a useful myth sold to subaltern groups by ruling elites or aspiring ruling elites, then perhaps this search was a false one. Or, in Ranajit Guha’s later formulation, the subaltern should not be expected to accept the hegemony of nationalism (any nationalism), merely its dominance, as it had of imperialism. (How much dominance is there in hegemony always/already/anyway? This question is not satisfactorily answered.)79 But this came close to embracing an old enemy: the ‘Cambridge School’, who made much, in an echo of imperialists’ own arguments, of the self-interested and unrepresentative nature of Indian nationalism, its proponents cut off from the people they claimed to represent, and the ‘thinness upon the ground’ of the ‘colonial state’ (i.e. white men).80 Gayatri Spivak’s manoeuvre then set up a form of autocritique that was potentially a form of philosophical suicide: the subaltern could not speak (in the language of history?), even when, and consequently except when, spoken for by an elite; they were then not speaking at all, and if they did speak, it was because in doing so they had ceased to be subalterns.81 (Spivak postulated a pure subalternity; Partha Chatterjee got round this problem by arguing for the subalternity of some elites, thus restoring the relational nature of the original formulation, 77 Guha, ‘On Some Aspects’. 78 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 79 cf Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 60–80. 80 A most popular question in Cambridge examinations played on this theme, and if the Cambridge training taught undergraduates anything about India at all outside their special subjects, it was that India was ruled effectively without white men: therefore, without much coercion and therefore with the consent of its subjects. 81 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.

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albeit at a higher level than had originally been envisaged.)82 The subaltern’s singular inability to speak unless spoken for83 meant that the intellectual now had a duty to represent the subaltern. The decentring project thus found itself centring the subalternist instead of the subaltern. In some ways, this might have come from taking early nationalist writing on history too seriously: if ‘we must have a history’, ‘we’ must define who ‘we’ are, and ‘we’ must do this through writing ‘our’ history.84 The answer to this ‘who-are-we’ question, dictated as much by international as by domestic events, was that ‘we’ were historians of India – or more precisely, Indian historians of India. By this time, the intellectual (elite?) could, if viewed by/through/via Partha Chatterjee rather than Gayatri Spivak, as Indian historians of India, actually cast themselves as the subaltern. This is by now a familiar story, and it is a master narrative that applies to various forms of intellectual production not merely concerned with ‘India’.85 Internationally, with the accommodation of minorities and ‘representation’ or ‘visibility’ becoming political watchwords in AngloAmerican (less Anglo- than American) institutions from the 1980s, it became important for some ‘minorities’ (however defined) to occupy visible places. These minorities, working on South Asia in Anglo-American academia, would now represent the subalterns who could not represent themselves. If their metropolitan location established their (relative) eliteness vis-a-vis academics working on South Asia who still worked in South Asia, they could certainly claim (relative) subaltern status to historians working on ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’.86

82 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 83 ‘They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’ is the standard translation; but see Gayatridi’s use of ver/treten in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, pp. 276–9. 84 cf: Ranajit Guha, An Indian historiography of India: a Nineteenth Century Agenda and its Implications (Calcutta: KP Bagchi, 1988), reprinted with revisions in Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, pp. 152–214. 85 The implicit transition as far as Subaltern Studies is concerned seems to have occurred spatio-temporally from about Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), the last of the series to be edited by Ranajit Guha. 86 This was not without its point: for instance, the categorisations of ‘History’ and ‘ExtraEuropean History’ still marked the undergraduate curricula of Cambridge University until the end of the last millenium, with the latter sub-divided into ‘American history’ and ‘The Expansion of Europe’. Apparently ‘American history’ had expanded adequately out of Europe to be granted a room of its own.

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By now, the initial project of recovering the histories of subalterns was being abandoned in the mists of elite sources, whose grain, even when read against itself,87 would not render unto the Vertreter his/her subaltern. Instead, the group moved towards examining strategies of ‘representation’,88 while managing to remain sceptical about there being a reality to re-present. Reduced to contesting the right of (hostile or well-meaning) Eurocentrists to represent ‘Indian’ pasts, but having done much to disarm the concept of ‘reality’ in the process, the subalternists’ only ability to claim their own right to write on matters ‘Indian’ (for they were hardly subalterns themselves, and had they been, they would not have been able to speak) was through their own Indian-ness, or in other words, through some sort of privileged but unprovable link with something Indian. This could not of course be an openly avowed position: (former?) ‘progressives’ or ‘radicals’ would hardly wish to occupy a position of ‘indigenism’ that they shared with mystics, religious fundamentalists and fascists. Indeed, Dipesh Chakrabarty specifically denied the charge of indigenism even as he declared the discipline of history itself to be an imposition of the centre on the periphery.89 But the retreat into being the authentic spokesman for a civilisation is a familiar one: this is the problem that Franz Fanon referred to in terms of the ‘psycho-affective equilibrium’ that colonised intellectuals are forced to seek out for themselves: to reify ‘their own’ culture by ‘going native’ with a vengeance.90 It has not gone unrecognised that the claiming of a privileged position as (post)colonised to (re)present ‘“Indian” pasts’, and at times only this, stands in danger of becoming the ‘project’ of postcolonial historiography: ‘. . . a certain postcolonial subject had . . . been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant’s position.’91 ‘We cannot fight imperialism by perpetuating a “new orientalism”’.92 Gayatri Spivak has been drawing back from the implications of some of the trends she set in motion. Dipesh Chakrabarty takes pains to deny the charge of indigenism, and to point out that he writes from within the ‘inheritance’ of a ‘universal and secular vision of the human’ that ‘is 87 cf. Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’. 88 cf. Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); genealogically, Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’. 89 Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonialism’. 90 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967) [1961], p. 178. 91 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. ix. 92 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘The Question of Cultural Studies’, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 277.

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now global’.93 And yet it is difficult to abandon the residual nationalism that has led the argument inexorably in the direction of the performative: the wrestling with colonising angels continues: Kant, Hegel and Marx are argued with as if they are somehow personally responsible for some of the ills of colonialism. Where Ranajit Guha once sought the contribution of the peasants to Indian nationalism, but saw this contribution as ‘pre-political’, Dipesh Chakrabarty rejects the category ‘political’ as it is constituted by hyperreal Europe and endorses the ‘peasant as full participant in the political life of the nation’.94 (The nation? Or does he mean the state? Or is this a slip of the pen?) And he postulates ‘the peasant’ as, in effect, a hyperreal category of resistance for the subalternist-elite-asmetropolitan-subaltern: The peasant acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of government. The peasant stands for all that is not bourgeois (in a European sense) in Indian capitalism and modernity.95

Thus, there is a strong residual nationalism at work in certain forms of scholarship that, aggravated by the problems of working as a relatively underprivileged intellectual in metropolitan locations, leads to an implicit privileging of national-geographic origins of those intellectuals – as the source of their authoritative right to speak for the pasts of ‘their’ national-geographic area. Their manoeuvres, however sophisticated, bear a family resemblance to older attempts to find and to privilege sources of the past uncontaminated by the ‘West’. And both the old and the new searches were/are carried out through routes provided by (with intellectual resources inseparable from) the (hyperreal) ‘West’ that remains, at one and the same time, the enemy, the facilitator of communication, and the audience before which the (re)sources, once the (re)searchers think they have found them, are to be presented. History could, instead of being abandoned a la Dipesh Chakrabarty, perhaps, be reappropriated a la Ranajit Guha’s prescription in his late avatar, as compatible with the indigenous in the proferred model of ‘Puranic’ history.96 But what is it, if the resort to the spurious connections of a shared ‘national’ past is denied, that connects Guha to this collection of texts canonised during

93 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 4–5. 94 Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe, p. 9. 95 Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe, p. 11. 96 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limits of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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the colonial period, which stand at the cusp of the sacred and the profane, the ‘historical’ and the ‘mythological’ (to resort briefly to ‘European hyperreality’ as a standpoint)? Perhaps it is the old nineteenth-century link: invoking the ‘precolonial’ in defence of the ‘national’. Guha then implicitly must resort to the ‘Hindu’ – and Brahmanical – ‘authenticity’ of texts anointed as canonical in the complex interaction of Brahmin ‘native informant’ and colonial administrator-Orientalist that was responsible for the cementing of the ‘nature of India’ for colonial rulers and (at times at several removes) Indian elites respectively. For Guha, History, or certain kinds of history, must be abandoned as imposed by Europe/the ‘West’, but not nationalism itself. Seizing control over ‘History’ and reconstituting it in ‘indigenous’ terms or as ‘ways-of-seeing-the-past-that-are-not-(hyperreal)European’ may merely be a matter of naming. Or it may be an approach to invoking collective memory in forms that exclude non-‘indigenous’/initiated people in a way that can only be logically circular: ‘we’ understand the past the way ‘we’ do, and ‘you’ don’t understand because ‘you’ are not ‘us’. If this argument presents the Subaltern Studies project in its later stages as ‘the peevish therapeutic attempts of a traumatised elite’,97 this is because it appears all too often to be that. ‘Bengali cultural history . . . is . . . the appropriately troubled record of a troubled society, often turning around and around on itself in order to escape the schizophrenic mindset of colonial acculturation.’98 This appears to apply as much to nineteenth century Bengali bhadralok intellectuals as their fin-de-vingtieme-siècle inheritors.

5 Pleading Exceptionalism: Anticolonial Nationalisms, Liberation and the Precariousness of the Indigenous All of these manoeuvres refuse to leave the terrain of the central question in the historiography of a (former) colony: the necessary connections between the nation and liberation. Perhaps the conflation of the strategic and the necessary nature of these connections are better explored by a digression into the politics of nation-building and of actual struggle in a more general context. The theoretical slaying of the nationalist beast within the historiography of the (post)colony has suffered at the hands of its link with anticolonialism. This 97 Note by Jeff Vernon on the typescript of a draft of this chapter; the phrase was too apt to leave out of the book. 98 Henry Schwartz, Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 162.

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pairing is in tune with the insidious conflation of two other separate categories and their mutual and implicit legitimation in the idea of the ‘nation-state’. Anticolonial nationalisms cannot, according to many writers, be subject to the same criticisms as the ‘mature’ nationalisms of developed countries, which have historically been oppressors rather than oppressed. (The question as to whether a ‘nation’ as a whole can be an oppressor or oppressee is often raised but seldom answered. We might possibly have an answer in the negative given that the International Court of Justice in 2006 failed to carry out a prosecution of Serbia as a ‘nation’ for war crimes against Bosnia, the case having been brought before the court by Bosnia.) By virtue, then, of its (collective) history of having been oppressed, and having become a nation in the course of anticolonial struggle, anticolonial nationalisms, even when slightly unpleasant, have had a better deal from historians. Does that moment of collective oppression pass? And if it does, should historians use it as an analytical category? If they do, then in what way? As a claim? Does it remain the historian’s duty to ‘narrate the nation’? There is very often an explicitly stage-ist argument that is used by ‘progressive’ historians: there is a need for riding the nationalist tiger for a while and then gently putting it to sleep. The nation must come into being, come into its own before it can be consigned to the dustbin of history. The development of the national ideal in a colonised society becomes the precondition for its breaking the chains of oppression. Then, the argument goes, it can think of dealing with internal oppression and inequalities, and proceed to socialism. As a strategic argument, this is reasonable; but the assumption of the leftist movement’s infinite power and flexibility to make and break nations without getting involved in the logic of nationalism appears to be overoptimistic. With authors clearly hostile to the claims to ‘tradition’ that conspire to produce forms of nationalism, there is nonetheless often a clear separation between anticolonial nationalisms and other nationalisms: ‘hating tradition properly’ does not apply to anticolonial nationalisms.99 The understanding that a nation has, in the course of struggle, to be made, built or forged, depending on one’s constructionist metaphor or simile, implies that anticolonial struggles are not good enough till they become national ones. Then again, the distinction in the Indian case between the ‘communal’ and the secular nationalism, the first being

99 Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, pp. 1–7; the phrase is from Theodor Adorno, whom he invokes in the title to the introduction; he still believes that exceptions must be made for national liberation movements.

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divisive and the second inclusive, implies that there is a proper way to imagine a nation. Let us take an influential text from another struggle, the Algerian one. Reading Frantz Fanon can be illustrative of a fundamental confusion: he requires a theory of national struggle, and must imagine a national bourgeoisie that will develop a social conscience. One gets, I believe, a sense of the instrumental importance of nationalism in a time of struggle. It is instrumental because it is neither considered natural nor inevitable: sectarian or ‘tribal’ violence are equally likely, and have to be guarded against, and it is necessary for the national leadership to be both authentic and creative of the new nation. How does the colonial bourgeois intellectual both become authentic, in the sense of becoming truly popular-national, and lead a liberation struggle in which the intellectual leadership is itself forging the nation and its ideas as it goes along? Unless one is particularly devoid of a sense of historical irony, one cannot help noticing certain things. Fanon writes as an Algerian nationalist. He is of course from Martinique. So his ‘we’ in terms of Algeria is a collective ‘we’ to which he belongs by choice, not authenticity. His idea of authenticity is in any case based on a Marxist reading of being truly representative of popular aspirations, as opposed to a colonial bourgeoisie who is inauthentic in still being economically and socially tied to the coloniser’s sphere of influence – an idea that Fanon and the dependency theorists had in common.100 Thus, in Fanon’s view, one perhaps did not need to be organically authentic to be nationally authentic; and this form of authenticity is clearly an innovation in the politics of a country. The title of the book, mischievously, is from the Internationale. Fanon takes the desirability of the ‘national’ for granted. But he does not define it. He conflates it with (the proper route to) anticolonialism. And he speaks of the need for a proper nationalism that connects with the people as opposed to the rather superficial nationalism of the elites (we will return to this question in the person of Jawaharlal Nehru, writing several years before Fanon).101 Fanon, like Nehru, writes commentaries from within a process of anticolonial struggle, as opposed to writing its history in retrospect. Reading Fanon, it is possible to find a palpable tension between anticolonialism and nationalism, or the need for nationalism. But he avoids addressing the tension explicitly. A nation of some sort is necessary. He counterposes this

100 See in particular Andre Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978). 101 See Chapter Five.

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nation to tribalism, as false consciousness. The nation as true consciousness is of course, for someone with Marxist-internationalist proclivities, extremely problematic. This is the tension at the heart of the text. The route to internationalism is via nationalism, and there is a strange hope that Third World nationalisms begin as liberation movements and therefore cannot be oppressive. Fanon insists that his position was ‘not . . . glorifying our own people’ (Fanon was not an Algerian). He stressed ‘the important part played by the war in leading them towards consciousness of themselves’.102 ‘We have been able to make the masses understand . . .’; ‘we have watched man being created by revolutionary beginnings.’103 The process of work, of production itself, will lead the masses to a superior consciousness, and the role of the intellectual is a Leninist, vanguardist, one. This much is clear. But who will educate the educators? The Fanon equation runs something like this: the ‘true’ nation is the ‘masses’ plus intellectuals who have authenticised themselves; and he lends his pen to the question as to how and why they must do this.104 ‘A government which calls itself a national government ought to take responsibility for the totality of the nation; and in an under-developed country the young people represent one of the most important sectors. The level of consciousness of young people must be raised; they need enlightenment.’ It is the state, or the claimants to state power, who must do this, although Fanon does not refer to this as the state: ‘We must take advantage of the national military and civil service in order to raise the level of the national consciousness.’105 Nationalism in the underdeveloped world must become ‘humanism’, through a commitment to social justice: A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley.106

Humanism is not a concept that Fanon cares to define. In his chapter on ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, he makes the distinction between anticolonialism and nationalism clearly at the outset, but indicates that the former ought to give way to the latter.

102 103 104 105 106

Fanon, Wretched, p 155. Fanon, Wretched, p 154. Fanon Wretched, p 161. Fanon, Wretched, p 162. Fanon, Wretched, pp 164–5.

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History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood.107

The task for the emergent political parties in the underdeveloped world is ‘using existing structures and giving them a nationalist or progressive character . . .’ rather than ‘parachuting in’ activists from the city.108 Fanon accepts the inauthenticity of a nationalist elite. A class barrier translates, here, into a barrier of authenticity: a properly nationalist middle class must cease to be bourgeois. The ‘national bourgeoisie’ too often ‘identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie’.109 As a ‘university and merchant class’, however, (really only a petit-bourgeoisie) it should not replace the metropolitan bourgeoisie, and it is vain to think that it can. Fanon here uses an argument that is now familiar to us through dependency theory: the new nationalist bourgeoisie might merely replace the foreigners, and remain linked up with the economic interests of the metropolis, becoming ‘the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent’.110 This happens all too often; but is in fact anti-national. Fanon’s language here is of moral exhortation, addressed to the national middle-class itself: in an underdeveloped country, the middle class must become ‘an authentic national middle class’, whose duty it is to ‘betray’ its own class interests, and to side with ‘the people’.111 This is the way to have a truly popular nationalism. The colonial middle class is not strong enough without the people and therefore needs to ‘follow the path of revolution’ or it ‘will fall into deplorable stagnation’.112 This is the external aspect of the need for an authentic popular nationalism. There is also an internal aspect/danger: post-independence internal colonialism. More prosperous regions dominate and refuse to feed the poorer ones. This revives ‘old rivalries which were there before colonialism’ – the link here is with what he has elsewhere described as less than national solidarities, ‘tribalism’ and internecine warfare.113 The question here is why the ‘national’ is assumed to be the natural solidarity; and indeed, Fanon seems not to be consistent in this. 107 Fanon, Wretched, p 119. 108 Fanon, Wretched, pp. 89–90. 109 Fanon, Wretched, p 123. 110 Fanon, Wretched, p 122. 111 Fanon, Wretched, p 120. 112 Fanon, Wretched, p 121. 113 Fanon, Wretched, p 128.

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The racism of Arab versus Negro, North Africa versus black Africa, he finds deplorable.114 He nevertheless distinguishes between ‘Western bourgeois’ racism and the ‘racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie’, the first being one of ‘contempt’, the second of ‘defence, based on fear. Essentially, it is no different from vulgar tribalism’.115 The national bourgeoisie ‘have come to power in the name of a narrow nationalism and representing a race’, Fanon says.116 The desired outcome, of course, is for African unity against neo-colonialism, which he shows to be far from a reality. Here, although phrased in the language of nationalism, appears the exhortation to wider solidarities: tribalism is to nationalism what nationalism is to African unity. But this is to be said softly. The tensions in the above views are clear, and were indeed clear to Fanon. For what does it mean if less-than-national solidarities are to be considered ‘tribal’ and yet internal colonialism is acknowledged to exist? What does it mean for a national bourgeoisie to become truly national, to serve the people and yet at the same time to tell the people what to do? There appears to be a built-in contradiction in the idea that the ‘authentic’ national bourgeoisie will recognise itself as serving the people at the same time as it effectively calls that people into being. Fanon engages in a national educator’s tirade against pornography, alcohol and slot-machines that allegedly are all more harmful for the African worker or citizen than for the ‘Western’ one because of the former’s lower standard of living, allegedly making him more vulnerable to ‘disintegrating influences’.117 In such a situation, ‘the impressionability and sensibility of the young African are at the mercy of the various assaults made upon them by the very nature of Western culture. His family very often proves itself incapable of showing stability and homogeneity when faced with such attacks.’ ‘In this domain, the government’s duty is to act as a filter and a stabiliser.’118 Fanon sounds here like a fulminating conservative rather than a revolutionary progressive. We are still faced with this problem: a national bourgeoisie, unless it is obeying a moral imperative to betray its own class interest, cannot but act in its own narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the people as a whole. This of course is not the argument in the book: Fanon starts by insisting that the national bourgeoisie must become authentically national by allying with the masses. If it does so, it can fulfil its role of educating the masses. This begins to sound a little awkward and difficult.

114 115 116 117 118

Fanon, Wretched, pp. 130–132. Fanon, Wretched, p 131. Fanon, Wretched, p 131. Fanon, Wretched, p 157. Fanon, Wretched, p 158.

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The question that arises, and Fanon is not blind to it, is this: can one skip the bourgeois phase in underdeveloped countries?119 He raises it, but dodges it as well: such a question must be answered not through logic but through revolutionary practice. He concludes: In under-developed countries, the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and growth. In other words, the combined effort of the masses led by a party of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class.120

Fanon’s problem seems here to be an insufficiently clear separation of bourgeoisie as owners of capital and petit bourgeoisie ‘middle class’ in his formulation. In the next paragraph, he seems to get there: The bourgeois phase in under-developed countries can only justify itself in so far as the national bourgeoisie has sufficient economic and technical strength to build up a bourgeois society, to create the conditions necessary for the development of a large-scale proletariat, to mechanise agriculture and finally to make possible the existence of an authentic national culture.

Insofar as the ‘intellectuals’ are indeed of the bourgeoisie, this is an argument in the spirit of the Communist Manifesto: the most advanced section of the bourgeoisie must side with the ‘masses’. They must help create the conditions for the liquidation of their own class, through the creation of a developmental state. The conflation of government, state and nation is obvious here, and this could easily be a retrospective statement on the sleight-of-hand of a Nehruvian nationalist project. Then again, Fanon is clear that the national bourgeoisie in a former colony is inferior to the ‘dynamic, educated and secular’ bourgeoisie in ‘Europe’ which can accomplish such a rule.121 The entire argument hinges on a form of taunting the bourgeoisie, through its intellectual members, to seize its higher historical role and to abandon its class interests. A text that is so often read as a justification of anticolonial nationalism appears only very problematically to do so. Again and again, Fanon raises a question that he must face: what, indeed, would an ‘authentic’ ‘national culture’ look like? His answers are ambiguous. He writes ‘on national culture’ as against ‘western culture’ and against ‘colonialism’. He admires the Arab League for creating ‘a national feeling . . . that we fail to find in Africa’,122 but he cannot be blind to the fact that a pan-Arabism cannot but create solidarities different from and incompatible with a pan-Africanism. And he is 119 Fanon, Wretched, p 140. 120 Fanon, Wretched, p 140. 121 Fanon, Wretched, p 141. 122 Fanon, Wretched, p 172.

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aware that the search for a ‘national culture’ does not solve much: ‘the past existence of an Aztec civilisation does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today.’123 And yet he is clear that ‘in the sphere of psychoaffective equilibrium’, an important change can be brought about by repairing the damage wrought by the coloniser’s denigration of the cultural heritage of the colonised. This is also seen as a transitional problem: affirming a cultural heritage would only take one so far: The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites. But once the first comparisons had been made and subjective feelings were assuaged, the American Negroes realised that the objective problems were fundamentally heterogenous.124

Still, this affirming of a cultural heritage is important lest in rejecting it the intellectual finds himself in a position ‘of cutting his last moorings and of breaking adrift from his people’.125 The dangers of a reification of ‘culture’, and indeed of simply reversing a colonial hierarchy is clear to Fanon: ‘It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style.’126 A dynamic national culture must not simply look backwards, lest it celebrate the obsolete. Fanon is also clear that the theme of ‘return’ to a ‘native’ culture is not actually a ‘return’. The intellectual in the colony must reject his ‘Western’ or ‘European’ learning, as part of his turning towards his ‘native land’. But ‘[i]t is always easier to proclaim rejection than actually to reject.’127 Fanon provides a three-stage reading of the trajectories of the intellectual: the assimilation of the culture of the occupying power; the attempt to ‘lose himself in the people and with the people’,128 which is nonetheless informed by the filters and interpretative frameworks of the intellectual’s assimilation of the coloniser’s culture (in a telling phrase, Fanon shows that an identification with the people requires intellectuals ‘to go native as much as you can’);129 and finally an attempt to shake the people and awaken them to action.130 This rather acute reading of the problems of an ‘authentic’ culture sits uneasily with his earlier readings; it is clear that a critique of anticolonial nationalism must co-exist with a celebration of at least some version of that nationalism.

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

Fanon, Wretched, p 168. Fanon, Wretched, p 174. Fanon, Wretched, p 175. Fanon, Wretched, p 195. Fanon, Wretched, p 176. Fanon, Wretched, p 179. Fanon, Wretched, p 178. Fanon, Wretched, pp. 178–9.

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Here Fanon’s text does much of the work of an earlier and less theoretically sophisticated text, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India. Unlike Nehru, whose text had to deal with the heterogeneous nature of the Indian population, Fanon could to some extent avoid the question of what a national culture might look like, and concentrate on how it might work. The dangers of an over-glorification of ‘culture’ are never far away from the concerns of either text. Fanon’s celebrated text provides a good case study to show that even in a text taken as being central to the legitimation of an anticolonial nationalism, the national part is either completely unstable or impossible to use without actually creating a conservative argument. Indeed, the severe tensions in the arguments used there are based on the need to use nationalism as a legitimating factor in a liberation struggle while recognising the dangers, the narrowness, and ultimately the self-contradictory nature of nationalism. Fanon’s argument is that nationalism is anti-national in the sense of being too narrow to encompass the people, too narrow to claim the necessary pan-African and anti-neocolonial solidarities; and yet he argues that nationalism can somehow escape this fate by becoming more national, less merely bourgeois, and ultimately by virtue of that less desirable but nevertheless valuable temporary compromise: the developmental state. In India, this is a familiar argument.

Slight Conclusions This chapter has attempted to follow a curious story of the almost-overthrow of ‘nationalism’ as a framework of analysis, and a near-rejection of the nation as a disciplining category. Attempts to disrupt the hegemony of that category have been partial or ambivalent; or they have been repressed, in some cases among the very persons who began the attempt. The selective remembering and strategic forgetting that becomes a part of official/‘nationalist’ historical consciousness is a means of control over people who might otherwise be enticed towards other agenda that do not conform to the interests of the state – by which we mean its custodians. This consciousness, if it is allowed to become hegemonic, affects the ways in which we can think of history. It affects professionals as it does laypersons, leading to the collective reification of the ‘national’. It turns critics of nationalism into inadvertent or provisional supporters of ‘their’ nationalism, or instrumental advocates of some kind of nationalism, because ‘we need the nation’. Or rather, we need the state. The disturbing unanswered question here is this: who are we?

Chapter 2 (Meta)narrative Although historical narrators are taught today to struggle hard against metanarratives, there lurks, inexorably, just below the surface of the narrative, argument, structure, or fragment, a metanarrative (explicit or implicit) struggling to express itself. It sometimes takes another reader to point this out to readers, or indeed to authors. One might argue about exactly how to reconstruct it (given that it is often implicit), but to say that one can successfully avoid having one is usually disingenuous. In this spirit, it is perhaps worthwhile to reconstruct a metanarrative that is generally sought to be decentred, and ask whether it has been decentred, or if not why not: that of the ‘Indian’ ‘nationalist’ ‘movement’. There is a paradox at the heart of this question. As historians of India we are often constrained to narrate, at least in part, the history of the Indian nationalist movement, as one of the framing narratives of our field. This does not exclude the possibility of decentring some of the main concerns of writers who have so far written on the subject. Attempts at a decentring of the dominant narrative conventions in existence have been made at least from the 1980s. However, it can be argued that this ‘decentring’ activity is now one that itself needs a centre, as both writers and readers of decentred histories, in failing to provide an alternative point of focus, merely draw attention to the allegedly decentred centre, which in some instances takes us back to the historiography of the 1960s and ‘70s.1

1 The ‘Nationalist Movement’ Let us follow the conventional narrative that has been used in the teaching of Indian history for at least the last 30, perhaps even 50 years, and attempt to examine the disruptions that have so far had an actual or potential impact on that narrative. It is a matter of judgement whether this might be said to be a straw-man strategy, but the question of the divergence between the highest levels of professional history-writing and the pedagogic imperatives of schoollevel or undergraduate teaching, not to mention everyday historical awareness 1 Since I have already stated my assumptions earlier in this book, the rest of this chapter must be read against those assumptions, enabling, if you like, a reconstruction of the metanarrative of the current work, including aspects of it that I have failed to make explicit enough or become conscious of. I shall not foreground them in the following pages. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-003

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among people from the well-educated non-specialist to the illiterate, might be invoked here to suggest that not all sophisticated critiques are absorbed at all levels. What follows, then, is a statement of the main lines of the story and a reading of divergences, in the spirit of indicating lines of potential recasting. Here, then, is what still remains (of?) the text-book account.2 Sometime between the last quarter of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a ‘nationalist’ movement not particularly radical, nor particularly antiimperialist or anti-British, could be said to have come into existence. In the main, it sought more ‘representation’ for Indians in the government and administration of India. In its most vocal aspects, this was a movement led by an elite, largely secular, self-professedly modernising and self-consciously modern group of professionals and businessmen, organised around a body that called itself the Indian National Congress.3 (These normative categories – secular, modern – were less problematic at the beginning of the twentieth century than they are today, and were still unproblematic in the 1970s, when this historiography took shape: they were positive categories, even when the precise parameters of the ‘modern’ could be debated.) Such men were well-versed in the histories of Britain, of British parliamentary practice and of a liberal political vocabulary that ostensibly provided the ideological possibilities of Indians being regarded as potential equals in the imperial venture, and therefore of Indian ‘nationalism’. This involved testing the practical boundaries of proclaimed ideology, the tension between the two being far from invisible. One of the Indian National Congress’s early organisers, the businessman Dadabhai Naoroji, from the minority community of ‘Parsis’ (as Zoroastrians in India were called), staked his claim as a British subject to a place in the British Parliament, which he won as a Liberal candidate in July 1892. ‘Let the Grand Old Man of India and the Member for Hindustan live long’, fellow Parsi and Congressman Dinshaw Wacha wrote to Naoroji on his election to the Commons. ‘May you prove to the British House of Commons that we are a capable race, fit to govern ourselves, under the guidance of the

2 Compare Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan, 1983) with Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s-1950s: Environment, Economy, Culture (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), for a sense of the tenacious survival of the older account in the new. 3 See for instance John McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); R Suntharalingam, Politics and National Awakening in South India, 1852–1891 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974).

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Anglo-Saxon, and not such poor black creatures as Lord Salisbury and his tribe would make the ignorant believe.’4 Equally, these men were open to other European ideas. The earliest coherent strand in Indian ‘nationalist’ thinking has been identified as an economic nationalism owing much to the experiences of Germany as a late industrialiser, and in particular to Friedrich List’s argument on the need for protection for industries in a newly industrialising country so that they could develop to a stage at which they could compete with more established foreign competitors.5 The strength of a ‘nation’ was centrally connected to its ability to provide alternative employment outside the agricultural sector for its citizens. Economic nationalists developed a strong critique of the damaging effects of foreign rule under Britain, and placed arguments in the public domain that ran contrary to the proclaimed British rhetoric of providing ‘moral and material progress’ in India through its beneficial rule. Classical and neo-classical political economy, as proclaimed in British official rhetoric, relied on the principle of ‘comparative advantage’, according to which countries producing what they were naturally suited to produce could with advantage trade with each other; India was naturally suited to producing raw materials for export.6 Indian economic nationalists pointed out that political control from overseas in the interest of an overseas country had distorted the development of India. Evidence was produced to show that an Indian economy with strong trade and manufacturing sectors had been deliberately destroyed by British rulers before and during the British industrial revolution, thereby also destroying the possibility of an Indian industrial revolution. The ‘drain of wealth’ from India and its ‘deindustrialisation’ were causes and consequences of British economic prosperity.7 The germs of a now paradigmatic description of a colonial economy were thus laid out early on. The most prominent of the early Indian nationalists were a cosmopolitan, often Anglicised, elite. Therefore, they were often discredited both by anti- and pro-imperialist writers (contemporary and retrospective) as non-representative

4 Wacha to Naoroji, letter dated 8 July 1892, reprinted in RP Patwardhan (ed), Dadabhai Naoroji Correspondence, volume II Part I (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1977), pp. 292–3. 5 See Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966). 6 S Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Administration in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 7 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Sonnenschein, 1901); Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India (2 volumes, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1902 and 1906).

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of Indians generally and as a self-interested and ‘undemocratic’ clique. Public rhetoric aside, it is claimed, this was not a pan-Indian national movement but a small set of regionally-organised and often caste-based groups; people with pre-modern loyalties masquerading as a modern movement.8 In some versions of this argument, they were businessmen looking for more space to operate profitably in a colonial economy: seekers of a certain degree of ‘dependent development’, to use a concept that dates from a later period.9 There is a certain amount of accuracy attached to these arguments, especially for later periods where businessmen’s involvements in politics were motivated – and tempered – by their desire for more space in which to operate, and also by their need for the colonial state’s repressive apparatus to assist in controlling their workforce.10 But businessmen were by no means the bestrepresented set of people among Indian nationalists; and the urge to national self-representation and organisation as an aspect of the psycho-political conditions generated by colonial rule – among persons who were, in many cases, at least relatively speaking, the beneficiaries of colonial rule, and who thereby contributed to undermining their own position – requires further study. One of the problems of this argument, moreover, is that it leaves the question of what nationalism is unasked, indeed, treats nationalism as a given: a comparative framework would require an answer to the question of whether, or where, there has been a ‘true’ nationalism that is both expressible in a popular idiom and is not an elite-led movement. And what has ‘democracy’ to do with ‘nationalism’?11 A more useful framing of the question might juxtapose the histories of nationalism(s) in India with the history of nationalism as a legitimating principle. It might be remembered that the ‘national principle’ was not universally acknowledged publicly before the First World War, and its implications were not even fully grasped at the end of the Second World War (the Bolsheviks placed national self-determination at the core of the Brest-Litovsk terms; Woodrow 8 This was the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ argument – see previous chapter. 9 Andre Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978). 10 Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Politics in India 1919–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–1939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 11 These questions were raised in the 1980s and post-date much of this early writing. See for instance Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); EJ Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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Wilson’s Fourteen Points mentioned it,12 but it did not of course apply to the colonised, who were subsumed within the ‘trusteeship’ idea: their care was entrusted to more ‘developed’ nations, and ‘trusteeship’ was later also written into the United Nations’ institutional structures13). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, ‘nationalism’ was a possible way of legitimising claims to collective existence and therefore collective rights. In learning to use the language of (Indian) nationalism, elite groups in India were appealing to a powerful principle that was on its way to becoming a radical force in European history. And because a central part of the British claim to the right to rule India was either that India was not and never had been a ‘nation’, or that British rule had the potential of making India, not yet a nation, into one, legitimate (Indian) collectivities under British rule had to take on a ‘national’ form.

2 The Problem Of ‘Authenticity’ or the Search for the ‘Indigenous’ In the early years of the twentieth century, there was an ambivalence in the internal debates among Indians on the role of the coloniser, whose presence brought resources of progress and modernity, as well as of disruption. The two sides tended to alternate, and even coexist; the figure of the ‘good coloniser’ (who in many cases was not a person but a tendency, a set of usable ideas, or a set of unintended consequences, as in Karl Marx’s reading of British rule in India)14 disappeared with time, as the pressures of the struggle for independence made the interaction between coloniser and colonised more confrontational and the sustaining mythologies of benevolent empire more and more implausible.15 (It could be argued that an undifferentiated image of British rule never altogether caught on; but after the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919, where British troops commanded by General Reginald Dyer fired upon an unarmed crowd to ‘teach the Indians a lesson’, faith in the triumph of liberal

12 See Arno Meyer, Wilson vs Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) [1959]. 13 For an early critique, see EH Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939) on the League of Nations and the contradictions of ‘trusteeship’. 14 Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853, reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, repr. 1974), pp. 30–39; see esp. pp. 35–37. 15 See PC Ray, The Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist (2 vols, Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, 1932–1935), for an account that traces this changing set of perspectives.

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principles and therefore ultimately of the argument for Indian self-government was impossible to sustain.)16 While the more vocal aspects of Indian nationalist politics centrally used a language that had much in common with, and drew legitimacy from, British liberal opinion, there were undercurrents and other discussions that were less explicit. Colonial education and indoctrination, devaluation by the coloniser of the ‘indigenous’ culture, and the partial internalisation of this devaluation also gave rise to anxieties, and eventually to searches to restore the ‘indigenous’ to dignified status, as there emerged a dissatisfaction with being turned into a domesticated creation of the coloniser. By the turn of the century, there were already persons and groups referred to as ‘Hindu revivalists’ who believed that a revival and revitalisation of an allegedly ancient tradition in the present would lift India to its proper place among nations. Despite the insistence of many of its ideologues, the claim of this neo-Hinduism to indigenous roots were shaky: it owed much to British Orientalist scholar-administrators’ discoveries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the ‘sacred texts’ that formed the basis of its appeal to tradition owed their standing in many cases to British attempts to find the core principles of the society that they sought to rule in their early years in India.17 Movements like the Arya Samaj, which sought its wisdom and legitimation in the Vedas, the earliest known Indo-Aryan texts, which therefore allegedly contained the purest possible form of Hinduism, attempted to reach out beyond the confines of elite ideology, in part by providing in Indian languages a strong pamphlet literature that could be virulently anti-Muslim and very far from the intellectually respectable claims it sought to make elsewhere.18 Nevertheless, in its addressing of audiences through English, it maintained a rhetoric that was at least assimilable to the hegemonic language of everyday politics. The anomaly of this situation did not go unrecognised, and yet it was recognised as inevitable. As the Arya Samajist Lajpat Rai wrote in 1928: Nothing is more humiliating than the necessity of quoting the testimony of foreigners in defence. The process in itself involves an admission of inferiority. But there is no use hiding the fact that the white peoples of the West are not prepared to accept and believe any

16 See Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1936), pp. 40–41. 17 See for instance the collection of writings in PJ Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 18 KW Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

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testimony but that of persons of their own race and colour . . . it was necessary to keep their needs in view.19

What the Arya Samaj owed to another late nineteenth and early twentieth century socio-religious phenomenon, the Theosophical Society, deserves further exploration: the Theosophists embraced Hinduism as ‘ancient wisdom’, providing for a colonised people the moment of legitimation that was not insignificant in their rediscovery of a Hindu past.20 In a social environment in which the culture and civilisation of India had been denigrated, continuously undervalued or considered inferior by the dominant values imposed by the colonising power, the suggestion that an Indian religion was actually considered noble by Europeans was an empowering one. Theosophy became the route for many English-educated Indians to return to ‘Hinduism’. The search for a Hindu golden age, marked by an Aryan civilisation, also linked up well with contemporaneous European social and intellectual currents, and provided the possibility, attractive to a colonised people, that they could claim a similarly noble racial origin to that of their rulers, thereby undermining the rulers’ moral right to rule them. The fact that the ‘Indian nation’, according to this point of view, excluded non-Hindus, and indeed many whom elite and self-declared Hindu groups had once considered low-caste but now sought to incorporate in a ‘national’ game of claiming numbers of supporters and natural members of a nation, would lead inevitably to tensions.21 There were of course regional inflections of many of these debates: in Bengal on the differences between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ forms of Bengali,22 in the north Indian attempt of neo-Hindu ideologues to divide what had hitherto been a lingua franca, Hindustani, into ‘Hindi’, written in the Devanagari script, from ‘Urdu’, written in the Arabic script.23 The contest for ‘popular nationalism’ also led away from rational argument towards populist and emotive rhetoric, sometimes used in an instrumental manner. In this argument, the ‘true’ nationals were already being identified as Hindus, while Muslim intellectuals who were uneasy with these developments and kept their distance from ‘nationalism’, were

19 Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India: being a reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s “Mother India” (Calcutta: Banna Publishing Co., 1928), p. ix. 20 Nehru, Autobiography, pp. 14–15. 21 This paragraph is in part an anticipation of arguments in Chapter Four. 22 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp 91, 130. 23 Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001); Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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already being described as ‘separatists’. In southern and western India, movements for caste uplift against Brahmin domination resisted easy classification into the now desired ‘national’ camp, sometimes claiming that the lower castes were the original inhabitants of their region and that the Brahmins were Aryan ‘invaders’; other trends would continue to undercut the unity of the ‘nation’ that was both problematic to define and impossible to discipline.24 Not all ‘indigenist’ arguments were necessarily opposed to accepting influences that were directly or indirectly the result of the colonial encounter. To some extent they co-existed awkwardly. The educational processes of colonialism portrayed the coloniser almost entirely in heroic mode; it was entirely possible for Indians to believe to some extent in the heroic image.25 In some cases, a useful formula was found in which the material and spiritual spheres were separated: in the material sphere, it was possible to acknowledge that India had much to learn from the ‘West’ – for instance, in terms of science and technology – whereas in the spiritual sphere, the superiority of the ‘east’ in general and of India in particular, was asserted.26 The acceptance of a stereotype that owed much to earlier and still existent colonial arguments was apparently not problematic. How far Indian ‘tradition’ was itself invented under British rule is a question worth asking. This includes the categories with which Indians negotiated or contested British rule: the nature of ‘caste’, supposedly a fundamental building-block of ‘Indian’ society; the category ‘Hindu’ itself, and its inclusions and exclusions.27 Colonial ‘reality’ was therefore to a large extent a creation of the

24 See for instance Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India 1873–1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976); Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: the Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); and as a subtext in G Aloysius, Nationalism Without a Nation in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 25 See Gauri Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990). 26 See for instance Dhruv Raina and S Irfan Habib, ‘Bhadralok Perceptions of Science, Technology and Cultural Nationalism’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 32, 1 (1995); Dhruv Raina and S Irfan Habib, ‘The Unfolding of an Engagement: The Dawn on Science, Technical Education and Industrialisation’, Studies in History 9 (1), January-June 1993. 27 The strong version of this argument is provided in Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); for its antecedents, see the essays in Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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coloniser, at the same time as it was a reality that the colonised inhabited, in the course of which they became habituated to it. They could in many cases imagine no other.

3 Twentieth Century Colonial Politics and the Problem of the Masses In all of this, it is difficult to find the voice of the ordinary man. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, however, there is little indication that this figure was of any particular relevance to the self-proclaimed leaders that wished to claim him (and it was usually him). Thereafter, the attempts were mired in suspicion, fear and various semi-colonial assumptions, as the central figure in the Indian middle class imagination remained the coloniser. A few illustrations from the by-now well-worn narrative of the ‘Indian nationalist movement’ will help to make this point.

Swadeshi By the beginning of the twentieth century, politics in British India was beginning to take shape crucially around the acutely felt political fact of colonial domination. Among self-proclaimed nationalist leaders, who sought to direct and control ‘a nation in making’,28 there was also a growing tension between the borrowed but also internalised liberal idiom of legalistic, ‘moderate’ Indian political agitators that had so horrified Rudyard Kipling in Calcutta,29 and the more ‘extremist’ ones, who in the early years of the new century found prominence in the movement against the partition of Bengal and the ensuing Swadeshi Movement (1903–08).30 The latter had to find ways of reaching out to the ‘masses’, and sought therefore to find a suitable populist idiom. Here, then, is a relatively unproblematic narrative of the Swadeshi Movement: it was a response to the division of the province of Bengal, ostensibly an administrative measure, which was widely felt to be an attempt to reduce the importance of Calcutta as a political centre, and to create a counter-balance to the organised

28 This was the title of a famous autobiography describing the times and the quest: Sir Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 29 Rudyard Kipling, City of Dreadful Night (Allahabad: AH Wheeler, 1891). 30 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).

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power of the Calcutta bhadralok, the middle-class ‘respectable people’. The government created a new administrative and political centre in eastern Bengal in Dacca and encouraged the founding of a new political group, the Muslim League, to encourage Muslims to organise separately from the Hindu-dominated, and allegedly anti-Muslim, mainstream of a rising nationalist movement. The resultant anti-partition agitation was led by Calcutta-based, mostly upper-caste, Hindu agitators who stressed the brotherhood of Hindus and Muslims, and accused the Government of deliberately pursuing a policy of divide and rule. Swadeshi also promoted indigenous manufactures, and self-strengthening education, particularly in scientific and technological subjects – incorporating earlier nationalist debates about the need for national self-sufficiency and the nature of valid borrowings from the ‘West’. Boycotts and swadeshi demonstrations were organised across the country, in solidarity with Bengal, and giving rise to an ‘extremist’ trend in the ‘national movement’. But in the search for a popular idiom, the extremists drew strongly on Hindu and often upper-caste symbolism. This could obscure the genuine attempt on the part of some Bengal swadeshi agitators to reach out across those limitations. Nevertheless, an undoubted legacy of the rise of ‘extremist’ politics was a rise in Hindu rhetoric in nationalist politics: the attempt to glorify historical figures who had fought against Mughal rule, now cast as alien and foreign; the worship of Mother India as a Hindu goddess; and more explicitly a reference to a glorious and untarnished ancient Indian past, identified with ‘Hinduism’. Sectarian tension and occasional violence ensued, as some leaders, with or without official encouragement, told Muslims that their interests and those of the ‘Hindu’ agitators were opposed. Campaigns of targeting individual British officials in acts of ‘terrorism’, inspired partly by Russian anarchism and partly by a Hindu revivalist insistence on the nation as a mother/goddess to be defended by valiant sons, can be traced back to the Swadeshi movement.31 The ‘terrorist’ tradition had a long afterlife; in Bengal in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a steady stream of casualties among British Indian administrators, and British civil servants were particularly afraid of postings in eastern Bengal.32

31 See Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: the Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Peter Heehs, Nationalism Terrorism, Communalism: Essays in Modern Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 32 See Michael Carritt, A Mole in the Crown (Calcutta: Rupa, 1986). Carritt was an exceptional figure: he was a member of the Communist Party and worked in the Indian Civil Service as well as with the Communist Party of India.

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Gandhians The Swadeshi Movement alleged foreshadowed – the teleology is clearly laid out – the great ‘Gandhian’ movements: Non-Cooperation (1920–22), Civil Disobedience (1930–31) and Quit India (1942–43), though it is very doubtful that Gandhi had any control over the last of these.33 The first was merged with the Khilafat Movement. Among Indian Muslims, the danger to the khalifa remained an emotive issue with immense mobilisational potential especially after the defeat of Turkey in the First World War. Gandhi’s proposed alliance with the Khilafat Movement, in June 1920, was on the condition that it accepted nonviolence as its guiding principle. Many Non-Cooperators who thought of themselves as secular intellectuals appeared to accept the principle that the ‘masses’ wanted religion and would not be mobilised as effectively by anything else. (The secular intellectual’s misgivings were not Gandhi’s misgivings: he said repeatedly that he thought a politics separated from religion would be devoid of morality and would be alien to Indian tradition.) Thus it was that non-believers were responsible for promoting a quasi-mystical religious style of politics. In this second-guessing of the ‘masses’, claims had to be made in their name, but it was Gandhi who retained the right to interpret what correct behaviour was, and it was he and his deputies who castigated the ‘masses’ for not living up to the standards set for them. Gandhi insisted that political organisations he worked with, both the All-India Khilafat Committee and the Indian National Congress, accepted him as ‘dictator’ for the duration of the movement – an expression that had not acquired its later resonances, as this was before Mussolini’s March on Rome or the rise of the Nazis in Germany.34 (This was the pattern with Gandhian politics. The Gandhian elite claimed the right to make judgements on the Indian people’s state of moral development. And if they seemed to reject given understandings of ‘modernity’, it was not because they saw themselves as anti-

33 On the ‘Gandhian’ movements see Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism: Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (1930–31)’, Indian Historical Review III, 1 (1976); Gyan Pandey (ed), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: KP Bagchi, 1988); Vinita Damodaran, ‘Azad Dastas and Dacoit Gangs’, Modern Asian Studies 26, 3 (1992), pp. 417–450; S Krishan, ‘Crowd vigour and social identity: The Quit India Movement in western India’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 33 (1996), pp 459–479; documents in Nicholas Mansergh (ed), India: the Transfer of Power (12 volumes, London: HMSO, 1970–1983), vol. 2, etc. 34 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1936), p. 73.

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modern; they believed they were challenging established yardsticks of modernity and replacing them with more viable and more ‘indigenous’ yardsticks.)35 The importance of ‘mass support’ in a colony is of course not directly in democratic or electoral terms, given the lack of the requisite institutional structures in any but the most caricatured forms. The colonial government, when it wished to appear to negotiate, found persons to represent various pre-defined ‘interest groups’ or ‘communities’. Such pre-defined entities had often been imagined into being, and acquired their apparent rigidity thanks to the processes of imperial administration itself: the colonial ‘realities’ referred to above. With time, elections to local bodies, and still later, to legislatures elected on the basis of narrow property franchises and electorates divided into ‘communities’, with severely constrained powers of legislation, came into being gradually and in stages, as Indians were (allegedly) taught the virtues and demands of ‘responsible government’. This was a caricature of parliamentary democracy; it was nevertheless the highest form of institutional politics in colonial India: even in the last stages of this so-called ‘training for self-government’, at the end of the 1930s, a legislature’s decisions could be overridden by the Governor of a Province or the Viceroy of India.36 In this context, making up numbers from among the ‘masses’ was political theatre staged before the coloniser. In order to force colonial rulers to recognise them, and therefore to negotiate with them rather than with the ruler’s own loyalist notables, anti-colonial nationalists had to demonstrate mass support – this was a prerequisite for effective bargaining with the government. By demonstrating mass support, a group could demand recognition by the rulers, posing as interpreter of the popular will, as intermediary between the ‘masses’ and the government, and in effect offer to act as a buffer zone between potential popular unrest and the colonial rulers. Once a group was so recognised, it also gained a relative monopoly over voicing the demands of the masses it claimed to represent. Whether it actually did so or not is a different matter. The Left This instrumentalisation of the masses was precisely what a more left-wing movement than Gandhi’s could be expected to avoid. The Indian nationalist movement’s rhetoric, under the leadership of the Congress, had, at least from the late 1920s, given much space to the importance of the ‘masses’. The

35 See Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 156–205. 36 Section 93 of the Government of India Act, 1935.

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differences between the left and right wings of the Congress were based on how far these ‘masses’ were to be at the centre of their politics. Gandhi’s ability to control the ‘masses’ – or at least the rural ‘masses’ who were vulnerable to his ascetic holy man image – was useful to the right, who therefore chose to identify themselves as Gandhians. But the left, from the mid-1930s organised around the Congress Socialist Party, correctly pointed out that this version of looking after the ‘masses’ was a form of control – of denying ordinary people a say in important matters concerning their well-being, their earnings, and their survival. Therefore, the left’s challenge to the right was in terms of organising and representing ordinary people: the kisan sabhas (peasant associations), the ‘mass contact programmes’ and the trade union movement broadly under the patronage and with the support of the (Congress) left, were the organisational forms that were to achieve this. Along with the growing importance of the communists inside the Congress at the time of the Popular Front from 1935 onwards,37 the reach of the Congress towards ordinary people could be said to have increased. This caused some anxiety on the right, but on the whole the numbers game of both electoral and agitational politics meant that they would tolerate this as long as they could protect their interests. But because even the left agreed that the Congress was going to be allowed to identify itself (as a whole) with the movement for Indian national liberation (as a whole),38 this meant that ‘class struggle’ might be interpreted narrowly to mean struggles on behalf of the lower classes carried out within the Congress by its – often self-proclaimed – representatives. (Later on, the Communist Party of India modified this position, during the Pakistan movement, when some compromises with the Muslim League on the basis that there were many ‘nationalities’ in India became possible:39 modelled on Soviet nationalities’ policy that had of course already been abandoned in the Soviet Union with the need for Russian nationalism to serve the Great Patriotic War.)40

37 The so-called ‘Dimitrov Line’ of the Comintern proclaimed a popular front of all democratic forces against fascism. But in the Communist Party of India’s interpretation, fascism was capitalism in crisis at home, and imperialism was the overseas manifestation of capitalism, so the popular front in India was one against imperialism. 38 ‘Ourselves’, in the inaugural issue of the Congress Socialist, Saturday 29th September 1934, p 2; Narendra Dev, ‘The Task Before Us’, Congress Socialist, 29th September 1934, pp 2–3. 39 G Adhikari, ‘National Unity Now!’, People’s War, 8 August 1942, reprinted in G Adhikari (ed), Pakistan and National Unity (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, n.d.), p. 6. 40 Bert G Fragner, ‘“Soviet Nationalism”’: An Ideological Legacy to the Independent Republics of Central Asia’, in Willem van Schendel and Erik J Zürcher (eds), Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Labour in the Twentieth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2001).

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Such coalitional politics led to its own particular problems. For one thing, businessmen’s demands against colonial domination could become national demands against imperialist exploitation. The cause of fighting imperialists because they were stifling legitimate Indian aspirations to development could disarm leftwing critiques of Indian capitalists who were, at least in certain contexts, on the nationalist side. In some contexts, for instance when the Congress formed provincial governments under the 1935 Government of India Act from 1937 to 1939, this became a particularly difficult problem: the right wing of the Congress dominated the governments, and worked closely with British imperial officials to suppress workers and peasants.41 Meanwhile the left wing of the Congress became the opposition.42 Insofar as the records allow us to make this judgement (can the subaltern speak?),43 we can, however, say that this was still proxy class war, with factions of middle-class political activists dividing in terms of their loyalties to their own class or to others’. They cannot speak for themselves, they must be spoken for – was the left’s implicit line, especially as ‘communal conflict’ and caste discrimination provided evidence of the masses’ irrational behaviour. This was a central aspect of organisational politics. Although there was the possibility of an emergent leadership that was more ‘organic’44 than that of the Congress members who were concerned with the masses, since they they did not fully participate in Congress politics their credentials were not recognised. (The Kisan Sabhas, for their part, did not fully merge with the Congress organisation, merely loosely affiliating themselves to the CSP, for fear of losing their autonomy and agenda.)45 Moreover, even if the Congress left tried to get them involved, the Congress right would have none of it. The CSP in Bengal, for instance, complained that the praja samities and krishak samities, peasant organisations that might have allied with a Congress left, gravitated towards the Krishak Praja Party, a predominantly Muslim-led party of mostly Muslim peasants, which was eventually swallowed up by the Muslim League, which latter 41 Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, Chapter Five. 42 This can be followed in the reports and editorials in the Congress Socialist. 43 Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (ed), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). In Spivak’s reading this is a more complicated question than that of the written record: in representing the subaltern the historian appropriates his/her voice; in the subaltern representing him/herself in a language intelligible to historians, s/he ceases to be the subaltern. 44 Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’, in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) pp. 6–23. 45 NG Ranga, Kisan Speaks (Madras: Kisan Publications, 1937).

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party eventually spat out the indigestible bits of its erstwhile rival and predecessor in Bengali Muslim/Muslim Bengali politics.46 The Right There was a relative absence of explicitly pro-capitalist or pro-imperialist right wing positions in colonial Indian politics; industrialists and pro-industrialists could hide behind a Gandhian rhetoric. Industrialists themselves claimed to be imperfect Gandhians in a less-than-perfect world: they held their wealth in trust for society, according to Gandhi,47 and were therefore legitimised by him, but had no intention of giving up their wealth in any practical sense for the public good, or their machines as Gandhi claimed was desirable. Proper Gandhians of an ascetic persuasion remained anti-machinery; they are sometimes identified as anarchists of sorts, but it is far from clear that this is an accurate description, given the authoritarian and controlling tendencies of Gandhi and his followers. There was of course a radical right: some of them former ‘extremists’ and/or ‘terrorists’, who had served time in (among other places) the dreaded Andaman Cellular Jail, where prisoners’ deaths were routine but which was the zone of contemplation from where many ‘terrorists’ emerged with new ideologies; some, indeed, became communists through their period of study.48 From the 1920s, there was in India a wide interest in fascism, not necessarily fully understood; but there were sections of opinion that did more than vaguely admire Mussolini or Hitler, or the successes in national discipline, economic mobilisation and collective action that seemed apparently the central characteristics of fascism. A determined group of ideologues of a Hindu race-nation-state set about producing an ‘indigenous’ form of fascism in earnest. Mobilisation through paramilitary groups modelled on the Black Shirts and Brown Shirts, providing schooling and indoctrination, martial arts and quasi-military training, became central to this project. Defining the nation in völkisch terms, men like V. D. Savarkar, M. S. Golwalkar, K. B. Hegdewar and B. S. Moonje argued that the pitribhumi (fatherland) must also be the punyabhumi (sacred land), and since Muslims’ sacred lands were outside India they could not

46 Congress Socialist 1934–1938; Shila Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal 1937–1947 (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1976). 47 On Gandhi’s ‘trusteeship’ theory, sympathetically interpreted, see Ajit Dasgupta, Gandhi’s Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), Chapter Six. 48 David M Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhapadhyay, 1975).

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be Indians unless they changed.49 The ‘masses’ were arguably more important to them than to many other sections of organised political leadership, but as far as ‘agency’ is concerned, there was not much room for manoeuvre. ‘Collaborators’, Outcast(e)s and Other Marginal Figures There is a definite difficulty as far as all of this is concerned; the audible voices are not only of elite groups, which is a historian’s inevitable problem of sources, but also of those with a recognised place in the mainstream of a ‘national liberation movement’. It might also have been noted that the coloniser often appears as a sort of reified and undifferentiated figure in the views of him as held by the colonised. This is a problem I have addressed at some length in another context: the colonised, as much as the coloniser, operates by conventionalised and stereotypical constructions of the operative Other in any given argument;50 the result is a conventionalised and unreal argument with a straw man (usually a man) – which is not of course to suggest an equivalence of power relations in the two sets of stereotypes.51 Difficulties arise when the oppressor and oppressed refuse to be readily identifiable polarities; or where a collective coalition of the oppressed does not line up unproblematically under the banner of the ‘national movement’. In India, with the exigencies of the anti-imperialist struggle placing even the communist left – potentially at least sceptical about the consequences of nationalism – in alliance and eventual entanglement with nationalism, the worst and most unforgivable of politics consisted in refusing the coalition of the ‘national movement’. Women, in this scheme of things, were expected by the ‘national leaders’ to preserve the virtue of the ‘nation’ as mothers and wives, ‘embody’ national virtue, occasionally even emerge from respectability in exceptional circumstances in support of the ‘national movement’, only to be ordered back home upon the completion of a campaign of civil disobedience, non-cooperation or satyagraha, strikes or ‘mass mobilisation campaigns’. Many campaigns in support of issues considered to concern women – the age of consent for women being a strong case in point – provoked ‘traditional’ (and often male) outrage at the possible use of colonial legislative authority in a matter so ‘indigenous’ as sexual intercourse, especially within a (child’s) marriage.52 49 See e.g. VD Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1928); MS Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1938). 50 See Zachariah, Developing India, Chapter Two. 51 cf. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 52 This was of course one strand of the debate. The debates on the Sarda Act to raise the age of consent for women from 12 to 14 (in 1929) came close on the heels of the responses to the American Katherine Mayo’s book, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927) that provoked

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To the Gandhians, women’s proverbial frailty was the downfall, potentially, of the virtuous movement, as their love of luxury and ornament undermined attempts to wear khadi, coarse hand-made fabric that was heavier than the finer foreign-machine-made goods (they were often silent on the wearing of the domestic-machine-made goods). (The Gandhian, J. B. Kripalani, while making a speech to popularise khadi, apparently told his audience that he could not understand why women complained that khadi saris were too heavy when they bore the weight of their husbands every night. This was reported to Nehru by a correspondent, who asked whether this was not overstepping the limits of civilised politics.)53 Frail and ornamented women might also tempt the virtuous away from their duties to the nation and their vows of brahmachari (a word that means something in between celibate and student), or cause the male to fail in his duty to preserve his sperm and thereby his masculinity.54 And yet when they were not frail and ornamental, women also transgressed. Gandhi publicly denounced ‘terrorist women’ whose participation in armed struggle against the British was to him not only not non-violent but contrary to their ‘nurturing’ nature.55 During the Quit India Movement of 1942–43, Gandhi was particularly keen to persuade women guerrillas to give up violence and to give themselves up to the British.56 These ‘unnatural’ women were paradoxically often part of a ‘terrorist’ movement that provided Gandhi the dialectic of his success; for if it weren’t for the presence of potential violence, why was it important for the British to negotiate with Gandhi? As he came in later campaigns to be seen by the British (encouraged by his businessmen allies) as a ‘moderate’,57 the continued importance of nationalist outrage by highlighting gender relations as an aspect of the inferior nature of India’s civilisation; Lajpat Rai’s response to this work has been cited above. As a result, criticism of ‘indigenous’ social norms such as child marriage were placed in a context where nationalist solidarity against ‘outside’ criticism had to be maintained, thereby strengthening the ‘traditionalists’. Katherine Mayo herself followed this up with her own second contribution, provocatively entitled Volume Two (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931). See also Mrinalini Sinha (ed), Selections from Mother India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), Introduction; and Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 53 MN Chadha to Jawaharlal Nehru, October 13 (1933?), Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, Part 1, Vol. IX, f 129. 54 Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp 3–27. 55 Congress Socialist commentaries on Gandhian politics constantly refer to this. 56 MK Gandhi, letter to Aruna Asaf Ali, June 30, 1944, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi online, vol. 84, p. 139, http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL084.PDF, accessed 28.01.2020. 57 GD Birla, The Path to Prosperity (Bombay: Eastern Economist, 1949), letters to Lord Lothian.

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‘terrorist’ and ‘communist’ alternatives – movements in which women gained some prominence – gave Gandhi his bargaining power with the British as the lesser evil. Gandhi’s refusal to press the case of clemency for the ‘terrorist’ Bhagat Singh and his colleagues of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, about to be hanged by their British gaolers while Gandhi parleyed with the Viceroy in 1931, may have been a matter of some anguish to many of Gandhi’s colleagues, and indeed to Indian public opinion insofar as that can be gauged, but it was consistent with strengthening his bargaining capacity.58 Women saw for themselves an important role in radical movements to the left of the ‘nationalist’ mainstream. They were able to overcome the constrained and constraining roles imposed upon them by a convention-ridden society extremely touchy about social change, and this appeared as if it might be a consequence of the coloniser’s impact on a colonised society.59 In practice, the (male) guardians of ‘tradition’ could present themselves thereby as cultural nationalists, protecting an ‘inner’ and ‘pure’ domain of the nation from the depredations of the coloniser. But the radical left movements, both in theory and in practice, challenged this. Or did they? Women in the communist movement, typically eschewing marriage or at least the visible accoutrements of traditional marriage that they saw as symbolising domestic subjugation, could be seen as breaking the bounds of respectability that was allegedly central to their ability to reach out to workers and peasants; they had, visually at least, to retraditionalise themselves.60 (In a similar vein, Muslim men were sent to propagandise Muslims, thereby reifying the ‘traditional’ in the categories ‘women’ and ‘Muslim’).61 As for the potential of these movements to liberate people, at least intellectually, from bondage to old values: it is significant that the journal of the United Front, the Congress Socialist, suppressed discussions on sexual freedom versus bourgeois marriage at about the same time as it suppressed the Trotskyist heresy.62 The problematic example of caste uplift movements under colonial rule is usually illustrated by the career of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, of the Mahar caste,

58 S Irfan Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and his Comrades (Gurgaon: Three Essays Press, 2007), pp. 79–92. 59 On this dynamic in another context see Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria unveiled’, A Dying Colonialism (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980)[1959], pp. 13–45. 60 See Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999, p. ii. 61 Yusuf Meherally, ‘Muslim Mass Contact’, Congress Socialist, 26 June 1937, No. 25, pp. 12–13. 62 See Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s writing on Alexandra Kollontai in the Congress Socialist in 1935.

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whose education (he had a PhD from Columbia University in New York) he owed to his patron, the ruler of the princely state of Baroda.63 Ambedkar’s championing of the cause of lower castes, his refusal to have his movement coopted into the upper-caste-dominated generic category of ‘Hinduism’, and his willingness to use British legislative and legal protection to further his cause has led to an embarrassment among historians as to how to place him in the metanarrative of Indian ‘nationalist’ heroes. Was his response to the British Empire that of a collaborator? What did it mean to strategically use British – or other – legislative authority, or more generally to use governmental capacity in the absence of one’s own ability to wield it? Was his an instrumental use? Ambedkar’s academic writing on public finance is very much in the economic nationalist tradition.64 But he seems to have been unafraid to put himself at odds with the ‘nationalist movement’. It is arguable that Ambedkar was used as a counterweight to the Congress by the British government in a protracted series of negotiations leading up to the Government of India Act of 1935, in which the British attempted to refute the Congress’s claim to speak for all of India by finding as many voices as possible that claimed not to be represented by the Congress. At the same time, Ambedkar’s attempts to protect his perceived constituency by leaning on British power and legislative authority were crucial in enabling some sort of representation in public arenas for untouchables and low castes65 excluded both from the ‘nationalism’ of the Congress’s variety (which is now commonly seen as ‘majoritarian’ if not sectarian), and that of the more frankly Hindu upper-caste-dominated tendencies of the Hindu Mahasabha, even though both of these expressed – habitually and publicly – the desire to eliminate the practice of untouchability and the social disabilities that went with it. By demanding separate electoral representation for Backward

63 See Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004). 64 BR Ambedkar, The Evolution of Public Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralisation of Public Finance (London: PS King, 1925). 65 BR Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi have Done to the Untouchables (Bombay: Thacker & Co, 1945), Preface, pp. v–vi: ‘The reader will find that I have used quite promiscuously in the course of this book a variety of nomenclature such as Depressed Classes, Scheduled Castes, Harijans and Servile Classes to designate the Untouchables. I am aware that this is likely to cause confusion, especially for those who are not familiar with conditions in India. Nothing could have pleased me better than to have used one uniform nomenclature. The fault is not altogether mine. All these names have been used officially and unofficially at one time or other for the Untouchables. The term under the Government of India Act is “Scheduled Castes.” But that came into use after 1935. Before that they were called “Harijans” by Mr. Gandhi and “Depressed Classes” by Government.’

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Castes, Ambedkar appeared to be diluting the ‘national movement’ and undermining the Congress’s universalising claim. Indeed, it is the Ambedkar manoeuvre that raises an important question about ‘majoritarianism’, sectarianism and colonial Indian politics. If ‘untouchables’, ‘backward castes’, ‘tribals’ and other liminal peoples in India were not considered ‘Hindu’ by default, then ‘Hindus’ could not be considered the ‘majority’ in India at all. (‘Tribals’, in particular, had been the subject of great contestation between Christian missionaries on the one hand and upper-caste Hindu reformers on the other, both groups attempting to co-opt them and to reinvent them in their own image.)66 Given the fact that ‘Hindu’ is to a large extent a residual category, taking positive shape and new forms under and in response to British rule, and continuing to be reshaped well into the twentieth century, a separate organisation of untouchables outside the category of ‘Hinduism’ was a blow to both the majoritarian politics of the Congress and the attempted (instrumental) inclusions of non-upper-castes into the category ‘Hindu’ that was necessitated by the deliberately fragmented and sectarianised electoral politics of colonial India.67 In the end, at least on this point, Ambedkar was outmanoeuvred by Gandhi, who went on a ‘fast unto death’ until Ambedkar withdrew his demand. Gandhi insisted that Untouchables were Hindus, and should not be separately represented; they could have seats in the legislature reserved for them as a proportion of the general (Hindu) seats. Ambedkar later described this blackmail bitterly and succinctly: I had to make a choice between two different alternatives. There was before me the duty, which I owed as a part of common humanity, to save Gandhi from sure death. There was before me the problem of saving for the Untouchables the political rights which the [British] Prime Minister had given them. I responded to the call of humanity and saved the life of Mr. Gandhi by agreeing to alter the Communal Award in a manner satisfactory to Mr. Gandhi.68

The two men made what is called the Poona Pact in September 1932, with tremendous consequences for the colonial numbers game. ‘Hindus’ were now by definition a ‘majority’ in India. Ambedkar refused to concede the point that the

66 Verrier Elwin, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: an Autobiography (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1964) describes these manoeuvres from the point of view of a maverick exmissionary turned anthropologist who by some accounts ‘married his own fieldwork’. On Elwin, see Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 67 See chapter four. 68 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 87.

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Untouchables were Hindus, and maintained that ‘[t]o tell the Untouchables that they must not act against the Hindus, because they will be acting against their kith and kin, may be understood. But to assume that the Hindus regard the Untouchables as their kith and kin is to set up an illusion.’69 He was extremely critical of what he regarded as tokenistic Gandhian measures directed against the ‘Harijans’: Barring this illusory campaign against Untouchability, Gandhism is simply another form of Sanatanism which is the ancient name for militant orthodox Hinduism. What is there in Gandhism which is not to be found in orthodox Hinduism? There is caste in Hinduism, there is caste in Gandhism. Hinduism believes in the law of hereditary profession, so does Gandhism. Hinduism upholds the law of karma, predestination of man’s condition in this world, so does Gandhism. Hinduism believes in avatars or incarnations of God. So does Gandhism. Hinduism believes in idols. So does Gandhism. . . . .To the Untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors. The sanctity and infallibility of the Vedas, Smritis and Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and the senseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritable instruments of torture which Hinduism has forged against Untouchables.70

‘Muslim Politics’ It might have been noticed that Indian Muslims do not appear in central positions in this narrative so far. We have largely been following the mainstream narrative; and Muslims only appear in that narrative as anomalous or as stubbornly recalcitrant, refusing to accept the imperatives of a ‘mainstream’ Indian nationalism. (Those who did were referred to, paradoxically, as ‘nationalist Muslims’.)71 There is a separate narrative and genealogy of Muslim ‘separatists’ or ‘separatism’: a genealogy of the development of ‘Muslim political consciousness’ that in many narratives is a tale of the tragic and misguided ‘two nation theory’ that led eventually to the formation of Pakistan. The narrative suggests that Muslims were ‘backward’ in ‘western education’ and late to realise the benefits of national consciousness; when they did, they organised late and separately. Marxist and quasi-Marxist versions of this narrative rely on the separate development of a ‘Muslim bourgeoisie’ as the explanation of a separate Muslim nationalism; but the case for a coherent and separate Muslim nationalism in India is as difficult to make as one for a coherent ‘Indian’ nationalism. Institutional histories of the Mohammadan Anglo-

69 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 38. 70 BR Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (2nd edn, Bombay, 1946), pp. 306–308. 71 See for instance Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence (London: Hurst, 1997).

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Oriental College, or biographies of the educationist and social reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, at first allegedly an ‘Indian’ nationalist and then the father of the ‘two-nation theory’ set up this narrative in its nineteenth century version.72 The imperfections and incoherences of (‘separatist’) ‘Muslim’ nationalism in India (usually, among Indian writers, not dignified with the normative-positive term ‘nationalism’) have come in for more close criticism than the allegedly more ‘complete’ ‘Indian’ nationalism. The ‘separatism’ of Muslims is often attributed to British divide-and-rule tactics, dating back to British patronage for the creation of the Muslim League at the time of the Swadeshi movement. The successful separation by the British of Muslims from the terrorist movement in Bengal in the 1920s and ’30s relied on such tactics.73 But this is an incomplete story. Though some ‘anarchists’ (as they often called themselves) later became communists, or participated in the praja movement which comprised mainly Muslim peasants, outside certain minor successes of non-sectarian or cross-sectarian collective politics, mutual mistrust existed for a variety of reasons. The fear of being swallowed up in a majoritarian ‘mainstream’ that did not represent their interests is a theme that can be followed closely in ‘Muslim’ responses to empire as much as in ‘backward caste’ ones.74 The relative absence of Muslims from the Congress-led ‘Indian’ national movement was a matter of their learning the art of watching and waiting. Some intellectuals of Muslim origin, at least, watched with interest the way the Indian National Congress turned in the 1930s: if it moved strongly to the left, they would seek to join. If not, the Congress could not, as a Hindu sectarian party despite its public utterances, contain and represent Muslims. Histories of Muslims, as a potentially insecure minority or a disempowered and impoverished slight majority (in Bengal) need to be written without recourse to a narrative structure that is centrally concerned with their failure to be true ‘nationalists’. There are other questions: fractures of class, political affiliation and social position cannot be answered in generic and non-individuated terms. Conservative Muslims interested in their faith, or in social control (for instance

72 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 73 The classic case of this was the 1931 Chittagong, instigated by British and Muslim police officers in the colonial police force after the killing of a Muslim police officer by a terrorist: Muslims were encouraged to attack ‘Hindu’ terrorists intent on setting up a ‘Hindu raj’. See Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 133–41. 74 See Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal’.

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of women in public places), progressives with a ‘liberal’ view of Islam, as well as many who were nominally Muslim but had no particular connection with Islam other than being identified by non-Muslims as Muslims, all ended up to a greater or lesser extent, and sometimes by default, supporting the ‘Pakistan movement’. This is too complicated a tale to tell as a teleology of ‘separatism’ or ‘Muslim nationalism’ (in India). Numbers, Negotiations and the Mistrust of the Masses A purist answer to the question of whether the disempowered leave coherent voices for the historian’s retrospective access, discourages us from looking in the gaps left for us by the above narratives, as also from looking at what these or alternative narratives cannot tell us. Perhaps, though, we can look at the last days of the British Empire’s explicit presence in India (discounting the long afterglow of unfinished business, financial and economic linkages, Cold War and Commonwealth deals)75 in terms of the relative agency and renewed disciplining of the ‘masses’. To step back a bit by way of providing context and summary: from the 1920s, British constitutional manoeuvres for India began to take the shape of finding a longer-term plan for maintaining imperial control despite devolving some power to ‘Indians’, with slightly higher stakes after the 1935 Government of India Act. Indians could easily find themselves imprisoned in the colonial numbers game, debating whether a reserved seat here or there could be conceded, whether a proportion of the population was to be defined as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Backward Caste’ or ‘Muslim’. Two processes are discernible here: one was that of formal politics set up and manipulated by British governments in India and in Britain. The other sought to organise popular movements and speak for underprivileged groups in Indian society – with varying degrees of success. In the course of the Second World War, and certainly after the Quit India Movement, it became clear that Britain did not have the will or the military resources to hold India by force after the war. By late 1944 at the latest, if not earlier, the penultimate Viceroy of British India, Lord Wavell, saw the virtues of an orderly transfer of power to a government that Britain would be able to deal with after the war. As a military man, his reasoning was relentlessly practical

75 See e.g. Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship 1947–56 (London: Pinter, 1993); RJ Moore, Making the New Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Philip Joseph Charrier, ‘Britain, India and the Genesis of the Colombo Plan, 1945–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1995.

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rather than ideological: such a transfer of power was by far preferable to a surrender to popular initiatives that led in unknown directions. The problem now, as the British saw it, would be to create enough agreement among the two main players in the negotiations, the Congress and the Muslim League, to effect such an orderly transfer. (In large measure, it had been due to British recognition of the Muslim League as representing all Muslims that the League could gather the support of Muslim groups behind itself, and thereby also inherit the supporters of these other Muslim groups during the war.)76 Yet it was after the Second World War that the politics of the ‘masses’ had its moment, in part threatening to break away from the control of its selfappointed ‘leaders’, in particular in 1945 and 1946, the time of the trials of the Indian National Army (INA) who had fought the British Indian army alongside the Japanese, the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutiny, the Great Calcutta Killings and their aftermath, and the Tebhaga movement of sharecroppers, led by the Communist Party of India among Muslim peasants who were often at the same time supporters of the Pakistan movement.77 It is notoriously difficult to disaggregate motivations for popular unrest, since individuals’ intentions or impulses do not easily leave traces on the historical record. The instability of the post-war situation did not facilitate clear-cut choices. The end of the war saw massive cuts in employment levels as soldiers and auxiliary staff were demobilised across the country. The bitterness of the Quit India and famine years had not receded. Further causes for concern were added by the day. Where, however, popular politics at times seemed to be in a position to set the agenda, in the end it was elite interpretations of the ‘people’s will’ that were decisive. Political leaders saw unrest, strikes, violence of various kinds, and almost millenarian expectations of momentous change; and they collectively conspired to interpret and shape these amorphous responses into an unambiguous interpretation of what ‘the people’ wanted. The timetable for British departure was hastily adjusted forward. The colonial power and their two main interlocutors, the Congress and the Muslim League, were in effect negotiating details while claiming to represent people on the basis of their interpretations of events that were impossible to clearly interpret. All three sets of negotiators feared

76 See Penderel Moon (ed), Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). This is also a central argument in Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 77 Adrienne Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal 1930–1950 (Calcutta: KP Bagchi, 1988); Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972); and on the INA and the RIN revolt and its aftermath, Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal’, Chapter Four.

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that the ‘masses’ and their activities might take control of events; all of them agreed implicitly, if not explicitly, that this had to be avoided. Outcomes would otherwise be too messy, too unpredictable, too disorderly and potentially too radical for all parties concerned. This had major consequences for the period of ‘freedom’ after 1947.

Conclusions: What is Missing In This Picture? A self-proclaimed ‘national’ movement provides a structure to this narrative. But this merely reifies the category ‘Indian’. Moreover, it does not enable us to get any closer to non-elite figures, or indeed to relatively elite figures who did not belong adequately in the ‘national movement’. The famed ‘subaltern studies’ project, in proclaiming itself, as we know, sought to find ordinary people’s contributions to the national movement, thereby misconceiving the project at its very inception. Thereafter, in abandoning its search for its eponymous hero, it left an important project unfinished: to view the lives of people without the disciplining lens of ‘nationalism’. The 1980s’ and 1990s’ answer to this dilemma was to suggest that one should abandon spurious attempts at metanarratives, etc. (imposed as much, if not more, by the narrator than by the ‘evidence’), and concentrate on the ‘fragment’, which, despite being (or because it was) fragmentary, showed up the flattening and distorting effects of the dominant perspective.78 This was part of a worldwide trend that perceived its project as left-of-centre: of attacking the pretensions to universality of perspectives that, because they were those of the dominant (white, male, middle-class, heterosexist, etc.), were in fact particular. However, this over-valorisation of the particular in the form of the ‘fragment’ was in danger of producing a trend that could not relate to any universal categories, or indeed any wider perspectives: large themes made little sense within such a framework. As a result, an old-fashioned elite historiography continued to provide the framing narrative. The tendency towards nationalist hagiography remained largely unchallenged, except where that nationalism tended towards sectarian definitions of the nation: a civic and inclusive nationalism was

78 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defence of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,’ Representations 37 Winter 1992, pp. 27–55. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) tried to place the fragments in a hierarchy that hinted at a whole – even the fragments approach was therefore not altogether lacking in a desire for a larger picture.

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preferred to an ethnic and exclusionary one, but ‘nationalism’ itself was inadequately challenged.79 The reappearance of an old demon has added a new twist to this plot. Since the late 1970s, any perspective that appeared to lean towards imperialist apologia was systematically and justifiably attacked in scholarly circles, and it might be supposed that this discrediting had been so complete that a revival would be inconceivable. However, late twentieth and early twenty-first century political developments, resulting in the revival of explicitly imperialist ventures, have also seen in some circles the corresponding revival of an explicitly proimperialist form of allegedly scholarly work, which has found a receptive audience, and not merely on television and in the popular press.80 However, this literature has not been taken seriously among scholars and specialists; and the historiography of India remains, mercifully, largely free of this tendency, with a few sufferers from imperial nostalgia forced into sotto voce asides within an established anti-imperialist consensus in the professionalised field. Nevertheless, the loss of a public consensus on the empire as a rather sorry chapter in the ‘national’ history of Britain, and an attempt by semi-intellectual journalists or public figures to use the empire to revitalise ‘national’ sentiment in the erstwhile metropolis, have been matters of some concern to professionals. But this throws up another important question, in the light of the celebration of the subjective, and the almost-abolition of intersubjective perspectives that was the product of 1980s and 1990s social sciences. There has long been an assumption among supporters of anticolonial nationalisms that the ‘nation’ must write its own history – in other words, that the historian ought to be a partisan for his (usually his) nation. For the erstwhile imperialist to return to a not dissimilar position is, in this context, perfectly justifiable: it is merely a different subjectivity. The problematic nature of defining any nationalism in such a way as to make it inclusive and non-discriminatory, and yet remain a nationalism, is of course not addressed. The problem, moreover, of an inability to separate anticolonialism from nationalism, and therefore of the (sometimes accidental) legitimisation of the latter by an adherence to the former, is also not properly

79 See for instance T Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 80 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004), the book of the TV series, was symptomatic in this regard. This mood in which academics in Britain appeal to a populist nationalist sentiment that relies on pride in Britain’s imperialist past, or in which academics in the United States appeal to that country’s manifest destiny in an imperial direction – has been amplified in recent times, with Brexit and Trump standing at the ends of the rainbow.

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addressed. But to return from historiography to history, inasmuch as they are separable: the problem remains as to how far a catalogue of life in India during the period of colonial rule is reducible to a catalogue of life in India under colonial rule, or is a record of responses to colonial rule. This seems to have been one of the problems faced in attempts to finding an organising narrative structure for the history of this period.81 If we cannot avoid the agenda set by this ‘impact-response’ model, except by escaping into a kind of indigenism that postulates the survival of a resilient and unhegemonised society,82 we run the risk of being unable to write non-colonial, non-national, and eventually non-statist, histories. Disentangling the explicit from the implicit in terms of ‘responses’ to British presence is difficult when writing about a society that had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, experienced over a hundred years of British rule, and a longer period of British domination and influence. Perhaps more importantly, to the extent that we can ask questions about the texture of a society, this has to be a matter of historical evidence, however imperfect and problematic this evidence might be, and however imperfect and problematic claims to the legibility of this evidence might be, and we cannot allow our readings to be overdetermined by retrospective categories and concerns.

81 See Paul Cohen, ‘The Problem with “China’s Response to the West”’, in Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), Chapter One, pp. 9–55, for his critique of such an approach. And his response to the over-indigenism of later writers: Paul Cohen, ‘Revisiting Discovering History in China’, in Paul Cohen, China Unbound: Evolving Prespectives on the Chinese Past (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp 185–199. 82 Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 60–80; and Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–8 for the ‘autonomous domain’ argument.

Chapter 3 Hurreebabu and the Royal Society In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, there is a recurrent character that appears in the plot more or less as deus ex machina. His name is Hurreebabu, which of course means he is a Bengali. Hurreebabu is a minor genius of sorts: he can speak a number of languages, has detailed ethnographic knowledge at his disposal, can appear in various disguises, has immensely useful local knowledge in a variety of diverse places, and rescues the main protagonists from many potentially unpleasant situations. The talented Hurreebabu has one ambition: he wishes to become a member of the Royal Society. This provides comic relief, for Hurreebabu, in Kipling’s scheme of things, is clearly not destined to fulfil this ambition; which is, to today’s readership, perhaps a little strange, for the Colonel, Hurreebabu’s employer and Kim’s benefactor and educator, who seems altogether a less able man than Hurreebabu even in Kipling’s telling of the tale, is of course a member of the Royal Society.1 What I attempt in this chapter, in a way, is to raise questions relating to the intellectual and emotional universe of Hurreebabu. Why does Hurreebabu want to be a member of the Royal Society? This chapter addresses the problem of the quest for an ‘authentic’ past among the Bengali bhadralok intelligentsia under colonial rule. It tries to show how Bengali ways of discussing ‘their’ history were attempts to come to terms with the coloniser, both as a progressive and disruptive force; and that at the same time, these discussions of history retained a search for authenticity, as a way of getting behind and around the colonised present in order to bring back something of value from the past as a resource for self-respect. This internal debate among the Bengalis was therefore also a debate with the internalised coloniser – a figure whose authority could not be broken without imagining a debate with the external coloniser. As a result, even if the ostensible audience was one of fellow Bengalis, or fellow Indians, many of these debates imagined or constructed an imperial audience who in the course of the debate were being engaged with, reasoned with, and often also defeated in argument. The concern with history was a crucial element of the colonial legitimation process; and was the key site for an attempted anticolonial, and nationalist,

1 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Bombay: Gresham, 1928) [1901]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-004

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legitimation process.2 This chapter, then, looks at the implicit presence of the coloniser in ways of talking about history, of narrating and interpreting the Bengali past. This was not mere event-history; it was history that concerned the meaning and the agents of progress, of the colonial civilising mission or the coloniser as retarder of progress. These theatrical debates were performed before an imagined audience, that of the coloniser. However, there is some ambivalence in the internal debates: the figures of the good coloniser, whose presence brought resources of progress, and the bad coloniser, whose presence brought disruption, tended to alternate, and even coexist. Part of the ambivalence towards colonial rule can be traced to the peculiarities of the creation of the intellectual in Bengal. As a product of that rule himself – the bhadralok did not exist prior to British rule in Bengal – the agonies of negotiating for himself an ‘authentic’ past were particularly poignant: what was to connect him to a precolonial past? At times this connection was sought through the category ‘Hindu’ – itself, ironically, a very recent concoction, although this was not realised or acknowledged. This lack of continuity with a precolonial past was, perhaps, one of the peculiarities of the Bengali case; elsewhere, the colonised elite, or the colonised intellectual, could perhaps better draw upon precolonial intellectual and cultural idioms than the Bengali intellectuals. The recurrent debate that runs through colonial situations – how much, or how little, of the coloniser’s contributions to social change, disruption or progress, should be embraced by the colonised – acquires a certain poignancy in colonial Bengal. If it hadn’t been for the coloniser, the intellectual and his class would not exist.3 And yet, the unproblematic acceptance of colonialism as progress – with the practical problems of its attendant racism, daily humiliations, and economic exploitation (the last not necessarily true of the intellectual or his class, but something he was aware of) – was far from satisfactory. This chapter is an invitation to reread the debates within Bengali intellectual circles on how to imagine collectivities. It seeks to make explicit for the

2 See e.g. Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: a Nineteenth-Century Agenda and its Implications (Calcutta: KP Bagchi, 1988); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Chapters 2 and 3. 3 There is some debate regarding whether the bhadralok was entirely composed of new men whose fortunes had been built up under early British colonial rule, or whether some of them were an older landowning elite who managed to keep their land; however, it is clear that as a class or as a coherent collectivity they were a new entity. See John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind: a Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1857–1885 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1983).

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reader what was often, to Bengali writers, an implicit presence: that of the coloniser. It is not intended to be comprehensive; but it does not celebrate fragments as opposed to metanarratives. Readers familiar with debates within Bengali historiography will recognise in this chapter a reemphasising or rearranging of existing points of view. Of this reemphasising, I shall draw attention to two points that might pull against an existing historiography: the disjuncture between a Bengali and an Indian identity and the necessity of its elision; and the impossibility of ‘authenticity’ in imagining a past untainted by colonialism.

1 Social and Intellectual Milieux This chapter does not focus on high literature or philosophical argument, on explicit engagements among Bengali intellectuals with the ‘West’,4 or particularly on professional historians – although there were many historians at work in Bengali intellectual circles. Instead, it looks at social and political arguments: the historical imagination of intellectuals who were not necessarily historians, but who placed their work and their public arguments, or indeed their thoughts about progress, loyalty, identity, etc., in historical contexts. It looks mainly at Bengalis’ writings in English. One might of course point out that the period in question was well before the period of professional and professionalised history-writing; but the interesting part of the story is the engagement of chemists, laboratory assistants, physicists, geologists, philosophers and poets with a sense of history – ‘their’ history. Now this wider concern with history – not ‘popular’, not ‘professional’, but somewhere in between, was a crucial aspect of expressing an identity, imagining a community, inventing a ‘nation’ whose traditions allegedly go back a long way. Of course, there were persons connected with this imagining whose work was primarily concerned with history: Sir Jadunath Sarkar, in his time the leading expert on the reign of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, for instance. But they shared the historical debate with these talented dilettantes. This is part of a collective history of the Bengali bhadralok, or at least the intellectuals among them. ‘Bhadralok’ is a problematic concept and a problematic category which has suffered from having to function both as sociological category and as self-description.5 Too much has been written on this to make 4 See for instance Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 5 We might take as a useful passage the opening pages of Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp 1–48, in which he tries to

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the debate worth revisiting here in any detail.6 It should suffice to point out that the term means ‘respectable person’ or ‘respectable people’, and that it is a status group more or less open to new entrants to respectability, the criteria of respectability also varying slightly over time. If it is to be viewed as a class it needs to be placed within the ‘middle class(es)’ – in its own terminology, madhyabitta sreni or more commonly madhyabitta samaj, literally ‘middle wealth society’. The formulation ‘bourgeoisie’ is a problematic one in a colony lacking a full-fledged entrepreneurial class (and entrepreneurship is not something with which the Bengalis were particularly involved after the early years of the nineteenth century). Intellectual allegiances were not clearly class-determined: the ‘traditional intellectuals’ of Gramsci’s formulation7 existed in Bengal in the professions (doctors, lawyers, etc.), but these professions were not ‘traditional’ in a colony; and in the absence of a bourgeoisie to which to play the ‘organic intellectuals’, what they might choose to justify is not always structurally apparent. Most writers have seen the bhadralok as automatically ‘Hindu’, but there is evidence that this is not always true: the dominant mores were by default ‘Hindu’, but Muslims could be considered bhadralok – although what I have to present here does not, for the most part, apply to Muslims, for reasons that should become apparent.8 avoid confusing sociological or historical definitions of the bourgeoisie or Bürgertum etc, with what the bourgeoisie thought about themselves. 6 See e.g. JH Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); SN Mukherjee, ‘The Bhadralok of Bengal’, in E Leach and SN Mukherjee (eds), Elites in South Asia (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970); McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind. Later work largely summarises the earlier debates; see, however, Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), on the Muslim ‘bhadramahila’. 7 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. & transl. Q Hoare & G Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp 3–23. 8 The best approach to describing the bhadralok is that of John McGuire: ‘the bhadralok cannot be seen as a fixed social group, but rather as the embodiment of changing sets of organic social relationships’. McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind, p 2. Put differently, the bhadralok or ‘respectable people’, was a social group which admitted new entrants as and when it was thought that these prospective entrants met the required social standards. Although caste did play a role in this, it was, as McGuire argues, never a major factor in securing admittance to the category ‘bhadralok’- and education was a powerful way of securing such access. It is thus easier, at any given point of time, to discern who was not a ‘bhadralok’. An ambiguity remains as to whether Muslims could be bhadralok. Existing literature seems for the most part to take it for granted that they could not; but there are instances of the term being used to refer to, for instance, Muslim teachers at Presidency College, Calcutta – this should at least be noted as an ambiguity which needs to be explained.

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In looking at Bengali bhadralok engagement with the impact of colonial rule, Partha Chatterjee has suggested the distinction ‘ghare-baire’ – the home and the world, the inner domain of ‘culture’ and the outer domain of ‘politics’; the women and the men. The first domain was, according to him, a protected one in which the particularities of an ‘authentic’ ‘culture’ were defended; the second was one in which the apparently positive influence of the coloniser was more accepted.9 I think it can be said that this distinction can be overdrawn10– the novel of that name by Rabindranath Tagore draws attention to the fact that the distinction was in the process of collapse, or at least renegotiation, an impassioned defence of the distinction itself being a reaction to colonial rule11– although it fits a pattern of dealing with the outsider that can be observed in other societies: the outsider’s material superiority can be acknowledged (and eventually appropriated and indigenised) if the moral and cultural superiority of the ‘indigenous’ society can be maintained. This is also the process that creates the reiterated and mutually reinforcing dichotomy of the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ in discourses on colonial society – a mythology that the academic world has been unable to disarm.12 The chapter takes its central examples from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries appearing here in two forms: first, as they appeared to contemporaries, and second, as they were reinterpreted in retrospect – the late eighteenth by the early nineteenth, and then both by the late nineteenth and early twentieth.13 The arguments are presented, for reasons of space and in the interests of a comparative framework, somewhat schematically; examples provided are illustrative.

9 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Chapter 3. 10 The rest of The Nation and Its Fragments provides plenty of instances of the breakdown and renegotiation of this distinction – although Chatterjee’s argument would be that the agency to break down or renegotiate the distinction remains with the representatives of the baire, i.e. those who do accept the ‘Western’ incursions or changes. 11 Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare-Baire (1916), translated by Satyendranath Tagore as The Home and the World (London: Macmillan, 1919). 12 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978); it can be said that Said is guilty of stereotyping the ‘West’ – see Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 159–219, for a statement of this position. But for all these debates, ‘West’ and ‘East’ enjoy a legitimacy as both academic and popular shorthand for diverse histories, politics, cultures, and/ or ‘civilisations’. 13 This layering process does not end there, of course; but a comprehensive survey of Bengalis writing about themselves would be too long, tedious, and more than a trifle self-indulgent.

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2 The Comparative Framework: ‘Nationalism’ The usefulness of a comparative focus on such questions cannot be overstated; for histories of Bengal seem to suffer from the problem of over-particularisation. Every group of people that wishes to cement a collective past appeals to history. Let us, for the moment, ground this statement in that ubiquitous concern of historians of South Asia: nationalism. Metropolitan historical scholarship tends to naturalise its collective past to a great extent, although the connection between the rise of European nationalism and each particular European national bourgeoisie and national liberal tradition has been pointed out often enough. Perhaps it is worth playing on a certain question: what were the intellectual resources used in European nationalisms to naturalise their pasts, and what, by comparison, were those used by colonial nationalisms to naturalise theirs? We could argue that the European resort to an invented Graeco-Roman past, and thereafter to the linguistic and geographical – often also racial – particularities of each nationalism, was at least as artificial as many nationalisms invented in the colonies. On the other hand, this myth had not been disarmed at the turn of the last century (and for some it has not yet been disarmed). In Bengal, the resort to a similar ‘classical’, Sanskritic past was a logical step. But whose intellectual resources facilitated this? We could also problematise the need for a ‘national’ past: with European nationalisms naturalised by the mid- to late- nineteenth century, any people with a claim to a legitimate collective existence had to claim to be a proper ‘nation’: that was the norm. Other forms of collectivity – communitarian, religious, ‘tribal’, etc. – were by these standards inferior. Therefore a Bengali claim to legitimate self-respect had to take the form of a ‘national’ past. The problems should be apparent: the claim to legitimacy has to be made in terms of a category, ‘nation’, which had no necessary continuity with any existing collectivities. And what was this ‘nation’ to be anyway? A ‘Bengali’ nation? Or was this too narrow? An ‘Indian’ nation? This would be more legitimate. ‘Nation’ incidentally, is a word notoriously difficult to translate into Bengali: jati, sabhyata, desh, rashtra, etc. – or even arjya for ‘Aryan’, ‘pure’ or ‘noble’ – all of which were used in discussions on ‘national’ identity, did not map unproblematically onto English or other European language equivalents.14 Was ‘nationhood’ to be achieved simply by projecting the Bengali collectivity

14 On language and “fuzziness” see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (ed), Subaltern Studies vol. VII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1–39.

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Figure 3.1: Title page of Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws from 1777.

onto India as a whole? And on what basis might this projection be made? A bridge category was required. This category could be that of the ‘Hindu’. And the intellectual resources that underpinned that category were – at least in the first instance – the resources of British Orientalism. Now, when Bengalis reached back into the past, they were rejecting the cultural arrogance of Anglicist interpretations of Bengal and India, which argued that there was nothing of value in Indian culture worth preserving, and that European, especially British, learning was automatically superior. In doing this, they of course adopted some of the misreadings that

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were written into British readings of India. This is a nice irony, in a way: in rejecting a derogatory or disempowering reading of their history by the coloniser, Bengali intellectuals were forced back into borrowings from other readings of their history by the coloniser.15 I do not intend to draw a simplistic genealogy of current Hindu fundamentalism in India from these observations. On the contrary, the usefulness of the category ‘Hindu’ was in its lack of clear definition; and it was used differently at different times.16 It should be noted that all these debates in the Bengali/Indian context were related to contemporaneous debates in British or European circles – and sought to attract legitimacy by this linkage; for after all, if the principles of the argument had already secured acceptance in the ‘West’, how could the coloniser refuse to accept their legitimacy in the Bengali/Indian context? This is a useful reminder of the origins and driving force of the debates on ‘nationhood’ in Bengal/India. The late nineteenth century official British position was that there was no ‘Indian’ nation; there were merely a few inauthentic, Western-educated agitators, most of them Bengali bhadralok, effeminate, incapable of action.17 Bengalis responded to this slight: there was an Indian nation –

15 For a similar argument made for India as a whole see Peter van der Veer, ‘The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism’, in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (ed), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 23–44, on denial of native ‘agency’ in the Saidian position. It should also be clear from this that I myself do not use ‘Orientalist’ in the flattened, Saidian sense, to mean ‘Western’ writing on the ‘East’ in general, but that I rely on the pre-Saidian sense of ‘Orientalism’: scholarship whose subject-matter is the ‘Orient’, and a view of administration based on that scholarship, that takes account of the specifics of the particular ‘Oriental’ culture and civilisation that has to be administered. I agree with the general lines of Said’s argument in Orientalism that there is a certain amount of stereotyping of, and a tendency to deny agency to, the subjects studied; I also agree that a good deal of Orientalist scholarship produced misreadings of the culture being studied – even when the basic research and knowledge being relied upon by the scholars were provided by native informants: the informant had little control over the framework into which his information would be placed; even when the informant might have had a vested interest in pushing his particular reading upon the Orientalist, he had little or no control over the refractions that his reading would undergo in the hands and under the pen of the Orientalist. 16 See next chapter: was ‘Hinduism’ a ‘race’, a ‘culture’, a ‘civilisation’, a ‘nation’, a ‘nationality’ or a ‘religion’? Was ‘Hindu’ unproblematically seen as ‘Indian’, or was it acknowledged as an imperfect synecdoche used to invoke a cultural continuity with an ancient past that would otherwise not be available at all as a ‘national’ resource? Were the potential exclusions of such categories recognised? 17 See e.g. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengal’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

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but the categories ‘Indian’ and ‘nation’ were pre-selected for them; so identities had to be moulded and justified to fit into those strait-jackets.18 There exists by now a respectable historiography on Bengali bhadralok ‘communalism’, or anti-Muslim sectarianism.19 But not all resorts to the category ‘Hindu’ should be seen as explicitly anti-Muslim; in fact, such a resort can be seen far more as a response to the coloniser than as a response to Muslims per se: a later form of reactive ethnicity that is akin to the reassertion of ‘indigenous’ practices that has been suggested is behind, for example, the sharp increase in instances of sati in the late eighteenth century, as British voices began to condemn the practice as barbaric – that which the coloniser considered barbaric was to be defended, that which he considered progressive was to be attacked.20 (This of course rules out neither the presence of anti-Muslim sectarianism nor the feeding into anti-Muslim sectarianism of this response to the coloniser.)21 There is a related linguistic problem: the still-not-uncommon

18 Given that the ‘nation’ idea is so normalised in current-day thinking, it might sometimes need pointing out to historians of the recent past that the nation form is in fact an innovation: ‘nations’ were not the only form of imagining legitimate collective identities. (Nor, indeed, were states the only form of legitimate political organisation: but the normalisation of both allows them to be regarded as the only legitimate forms, and even confused: the ‘United Nations’, for instance, is a collection of states.) Some of these problems are implicitly acknowledged in Soviet nationalities policy: there can be multi-national states. But even in the Soviet Union, non-‘national’ collectivities were encouraged into acquiring ‘national’ cultures – if a group of people did not imagine themselves as a nation as yet, it was necessary to invent them as one. Later on, ‘national deviationism’ became feared among some of the very people who had had their nationalities invented for them by the Soviet centre. See Bert G Fragner, ‘“Soviet Nationalism”: An Ideological Legacy to the Independent Republics of Central Asia’, in Willem van Schendel and Erik J Zürcher (eds), Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Labour in the Twentieth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2001), for a perceptive analysis of this problem. 19 See e.g. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Pradip Datta, Carving Blocs (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 20 Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati: A Nineteenth Century tale of Women, Violence and Protest’, in Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980); Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 88–126. (The motivations of those who revived or intensified this practice are not as open to scrutiny as the later material this chapter deals with: they were not, in most cases, the articulate classes who left records of their engagement with the coloniser.) 21 This insight has been available for some time now, but has not quite been made explicit. In another context, Penderel Moon, ‘A Communal Riot’, Strangers in India (London: Faber and

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distinction between a ‘true nationalism’ and a ‘communal consciousness’ does not translate properly into Bengali: jatiyata versus sampradayikata? Jati and sampraday of course don’t carry the same meanings as the abstract nouns derived from them. There were some bhadralok for whom the pride in a ‘Hindu’ past did not mean a necessary failure to recognise the achievements of a ‘Muslim’ past. In the literary imagination, as has often been noted, Marathas, Rajputs and Sikhs who fought against the Mughal emperors were glorified as quasi-nationalist figures – but often in the same circles as those who wrote poetry about the glories of the Mughal court, or of Siraj-ud-Daulah as the legitimate monarch betrayed by his perfidious underlings.22 This was a contradictoriness about imagining India which refused to go away. Some, like Rabindranath Tagore, later acknowledged the implicitly exclusive nature of their India, by default (but not intentionally) ‘Hindu’.23 Others were less self-aware. There was certainly a distance to be bridged between mainstream nationalism – often by default tending towards Hindu parochialism (though often also deliberately) and Muslim nationalism – not necessarily a religious nationalism, but certainly a nationalism which foresaw potential problems for minorities in a majority-ruled independent India.24 The distinction between an aggressively anti-Muslim Hindu sectarianism and an implicitly exclusionary position needs to be maintained. What has all this to do with the coloniser? The categories in terms of which Bengali intellectuals had to respond to the colonial presence were those set in place by the coloniser. They, the Bengalis, retreated from the alleged (and often self-perceived) inauthenticity of their adopted British modes of behaviour by

Faber, 1944), suggested that communal riots might be an outcome of a desire to defy the British colonial power’s authority to impose order rather than an intrinsic hatred of the other community (this of course would be difficult to establish through hard evidence). 22 Examples include Rabindranath Tagore’s poem ‘Horikhela’, in Rabindranath Tagore, Kotha o Kahini [1900], reprinted in Rabindra Rachanabali, Volume Four (Calcutta: Vishvabharati, 1995), pp. 68–71; Girish Ghosh’s plays include Satnam (1904), (on the Satnami rebellion in Aurangzeb’s reign), Sirajaddaula (1905), Meer Kasem (1906), Chhatrapati Shivaji (1907). Dwijendralal Roy’s plays include Rana Pratapsingh (1905), Nurjahan (1908), Shahjahan (1909). Much of this is clustered around the period of the Swadeshi movement. See Ajitkumar Ghosh, Bangla Natoker Itihash (Calcutta: General Printers and Publishers, 1985), pp 155–199, 220–248; Sukumar Sen, Bangla Shahityer Itihash, Seventh Edition, Volume Two (Calcutta: Eastern Publishers, 1979), pp. 339–358, 368–373. I thank Trina Banerjee for drawing my attention to the theatrical material referred to here. 23 This point has been made strongly by Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan, 1983), pp 122–3. 24 See e.g. Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999.

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seeking authenticity in a precolonial past – but that precolonial past was often only recoverable through ‘foreign’ intermediaries – the Orientalists, for instance – given that a direct and privileged link to this precolonial past did not exist for them. And above all – because a response is of course an engagement with, rather than a disengagement from, colonial categories – the last link in the chain of self-legitimising came from forcing the coloniser to accept the validity of the new identity.

3 The Comparative Framework: ‘Progress’ and the Colonisers So far, this chapter has dealt with the dominant comparison and comparative framework presented to the colonised by the coloniser, and then internalised: Europe/the ‘West’ versus Bengal/India/the ‘East’. Most subsequent scholarship has been unable to reject this framework of a dichotomy of mutually reinforcing essentialisms, even when rejecting its assumptions or attempting to reverse the hierarchies it contained (or still contains).25 We might be better placed if we compare the experiences of the colonised in different contexts, and our focus can therefore avoid this framework to some extent: we are comparing peripheries. But inasmuch as the peripheries engage with the centres, we must engage with those centres. The problem is that centres shift. Criteria of centrality tend to be based on perceived success. Peter the Great regarded Russia as an Oriental and backward country that had to be Westernised – an example of casting oneself as the periphery. Part of Russia’s search for self-de-Orientalisation was through the adoption of technology; part of this was through de-Orientalising the court: shorter robes, shorter beards, and so on. Many Russian intellectuals cast Russia itself as backward, linking it up with its ‘Easternness’ in its backwardness, and setting a goal of progress that they associated with the ‘West’. This perception lasted into Marxist thinking, in which in some versions Russia could only have a bourgeois revolution, not a socialist one, because of its relative backwardness; or that the Russian Revolution had rolled two revolutions into one, and could only survive if it was followed and supported by revolutions in the more developed countries. But Russian history also had its phase of searching for ‘indigenous’ solutions: Tolstoy or the Narodniks sought an ‘authentic’ solution to the problems of Russia and the possibility of ‘socialism’ – a model that, notably, influenced Gandhi – and

25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) can be read within the same framework.

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‘socialism in one country’ drew strongly on aspects of Russian chauvinism, even as the USSR became the centre for other peoples’ imagination of a path to socialism. So both the adoption of the successful model, and its (partial?) rejection in favour of something ‘indigenous’, can be seen in Russian socio-political developments, as they can be in responses to the coloniser in, for instance, Russian-ruled Central Asia and British-ruled Bengal.26 But – and this is crucial – both adoption and rejection are aspects of an engagement with a more successful centre, even if that centre is diffuse, ill-defined and somewhat mythologised. Which brings us to the old question: what is specifically ‘colonial’ about the colonial situation? We could say – and this might provide us with an organising principle for comparing diverse experiences under the somewhat loose rubric of ‘colonial encounters’ – that it is the sense of an imposed centre: the illusion of choice is extremely important. Perhaps, therefore, the need to reject the coloniser’s imposed model of progress is important even as aspects of that model are adopted; or, to put it differently, ‘derivative’ or not, the colonised’s engagement with the coloniser’s imposed changes must be seen to be different.27 We might find striking parallels elsewhere. Patterns of Central Asian perceptions of the Russians, of Iranian perceptions of the Europeans, and nineteenth-century Bengali perceptions of the British were analogous: curiosity, enthusiastic idealisation of European civilisation and modernity, rejection and critique of the colonial powers.28 This is, of course, historical shorthand, and is not to be considered an altogether linear or strictly chronological analysis of responses to the coloniser; these perceptions criss-crossed each other, and ambivalently co-existed. And to return to the central problem of this chapter: on whose terms, on the basis of what intellectual resources, could the problem of the coloniser be engaged with? In the Bengali intellectuals’ case, a lack of continuity with a precolonial (intellectual, social) past led to these resources largely being those provided by the coloniser himself. Bengali madhyabitta samaj, from which intellectuals tended to be drawn, had no precolonial existence; having acquired

26 See Beate Eschment and Hans Harder (ed), Looking at the Coloniser (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004), in which this chapter started its public life in an earlier avatar. 27 To borrow and paraphrase Partha Chatterjee’s formulation in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 28 See Daniel R Brower and Edward J Lazzerini (ed), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1997); Rudi Mathee, ‘Between Sympathy and Enmity: Nineteenth-Century Iranian Views of the British and the Russians’, in Beate Eschment and Hans Harder (ed), Looking at the Coloniser (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004), pp. 311–338.

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wealth as collaborators of the East India Company in the days when trade was plunder, they bought their way into landed property and respectability, paying for the privilege of high caste genealogies and acquiring a high culture that had largely to be invented. The processes of colonial education, adopted at first instrumentally by this new elite in the hope of furthering its chances of employment and material benefit under British rule, also had the effect of devaluing by repeated denigration, and eventually detaching the next generations from, precolonial values, practices or customs.29 Perhaps, elsewhere, the colonised elite, or the colonised intellectual, could better draw upon precolonial intellectual and cultural resources: the Central Asian jadidi placed his interventions within an older idiom of Muslim public debate (not necessarily about religion but about society).30 In the Bukharan jadid Abdurrauf Fitrat’s Tales of an Indian Traveller or his Debate between a Bukharan Teacher and a European, the author’s rendering of the dialogues enables Europeans to present the case for modern medicine or science as not incompatible with Islam as if they were fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Quran.31 This is not to suggest that the Central Asians could be seen as somehow more ‘authentic’ than the Bengalis: what we see here is continuity in idioms of presentation; what we don’t see is how far ‘[t]he jadids had internalised several categories of colonial knowledge’.32 Even when the argument being made is of the universality of progressive knowledge rather than its alienness, the idiom of presentation remains apparently within precolonial traditions – thereby ‘indigenising’ the appropriated knowledge. Another useful counter-example to the Bengali case is that of late Qing China – where the ‘self-strengthening movement’ of the late nineteenth century used as a principle of separation an engagement with the ‘Western’ powers’ knowledge on the basis of preserving the essentials of the indigenous, and absorbing the useful of the new – represented by the abbreviation ti-yong (‘essence’-‘practical

29 This is embodied in the history of the Hindu College, Calcutta. See Benjamin Zachariah, Subhas Ranjan Chakraborti and Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Presidency College, Calcutta: An Unfinished History’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed), Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), pp. 304–388. 30 The historical material on Central Asia has many echoes for a historian of colonial Bengal, or colonial India. Historians appear to be grappling with similar problems; and some appear to be reading in the historiography of colonial India and Bengal, especially the writing of the Subaltern Studies group. See Brower and Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient. 31 Adeeb Khalid, ‘Representations of Russia in Central Asian Jadid Discourse’, in Brower and Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient; Adeeb Khalid, ‘Visions of India in Central Asian Modernism: the Work of Abdurrauf Fitrat’, in Eschment and Harder (ed), Looking at the Coloniser. 32 Khalid, ‘Representations of Russia’, in Brower and Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient, p 200.

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use’).33 These were debates conducted among mandarins and court officials; an engagement that was not so apparently enforced according to the idioms of the outsiders. Again, China was not formally a colony; the prestige of the mandarins and the imperial court was pressed into the service of the attempted reforms. Reformers had, of course, begun to learn European languages and to read European writers; but the absorption was softened by the idiom. Could a Bengali literary tradition provide the equivalent softening agent? Equivalent dialogues in Bengal, for instance, in the journals of Bankimchandra’s fictional opium-addicted bhadralok character, Kamalakanta, who makes his observations about the world at large through his drug-induced fantasies, seem to have no parallels in precolonial Bengali literature34; indeed, the Bengali language itself was remodelled to be a ‘progressive’, ‘modern’ language under British rule, and given a Sanskritised, respectably ‘classical’ genealogy. In the mid-nineteenth century, intellectuals ‘returned’ to writing in Bengali after escapades with the English language. The typical mode of literary exposition was the novel; Bankim’s first novel was in fact in English.35 A recurrent theme in the writing of nineteenth century Bengali literary figures is that of the imitative Bengali who seeks to become a quasi-British creature. The iconoclasm of the early nineteenth century Young Bengal movement that once rejected all religion, expressed its rejection of its own traditions by eating beef and declaring its hatred of ‘Hinduism’, but eventually gravitated towards Christianity and alcoholism (not necessarily in that order),36 becomes symbolic of the failure of that early quest and a consequent sense of uprootedness, parodied and condemned in equal measure by conservative social critics and literary figures with radical pretensions, the two categories not necessarily clearly separate. This is a subject that caused some amount of anxiety because it is part of a journey for writers themselves, and the caricaturing of this figure is in large measure self-caricature. As if to mock the writer’s agency despite his own intentions, however, there was no escape from the coloniser’s all-embracing influence, even in internal debates, not intended to be accessible to the coloniser. The pedantic, affected verse of the 33 See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: WW Norton, 1999) (1990), pp 224–5; Henrietta Harrison, Inventing the Nation: China (London: Arnold, 2001), pp 67, 119; Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace; The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895–1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) (1981), pp 36–44. 34 On Kamalakanta and Bankimchandra, see Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 35 Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rajmohan’s Wife: A Novel (Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1996) [1864–65]. 36 See the essays in Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985).

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Christian convert Michael Madhusudhan Datta’s ‘return’ to writing in Bengali, Bangabhasa, is written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet.37

4 Historical Models The central problem of these early engagements was that the alleged move towards ‘progress’ came in the shape of an invader, and the price of that ‘progress’ was a devaluation of the Bengali self that had to be tolerated, or even internalised. The recording of the (partial) rejection of the contention that colonial rule was ‘progress’ has been the main job of subsequent writing and of much historiography; but the tendency among Bengali intellectuals that colonial rule had to be accepted as in some ways progressive – or else their own existence was illegitimate, given their own origins and entanglement in colonial rule – needs also to be adequately weighted. History was a field on which the British invader’s flag was firmly planted. Indians allegedly had no sense of History, or even of the importance of their own past. The British, as the story goes, provided the Indians with the gift of a real history, as opposed to backward superstitious myths and legends. In nineteenth-century British tellings of the tale, India had once been a great civilisation (in the ancient, ‘Hindu’, past) – this was the Orientalist version. Then this greatness had decayed, the country had been overtaken by ‘Mahomedan’ tyrants, and the rescue from such tyranny had only come with the British conquest and re-establishment of order and prosperity. Since the writing of James Mill, the anti-Orientalist and Utilitarian, the division of Indian history into a Hindu, a ‘Mahomedan’ or Muslim, and a British period, was normalised; Mill of course denied that the ‘Hindu’ past had ever been worthy of note. But he agreed that the ‘rescue’ came with the British.38 We might briefly remind ourselves here that legitimate collectivities under British rule had to take on a ‘national’ form; and that since the collectivity presupplied for that purpose was ‘India’, not ‘Bengal’, the national entity that had to be imagined was the ‘Indian’ nation. Since it was Bengali intellectuals who were in the first instance concerned with this imagining, as the first Indians to be subject to the full rigours of British colonial rule, it was logical that they projected the particularities of Bengal onto the rest of India.

37 Michael Madhusudan Datta, ‘Bangabhasha’, in Chaturdoshpadi Kabitaboli (1866). See Sukumar Sen, Bangla Shahityer Itihash, Volume Two, pp. 66–87, 142–156. 38 James Mill, A History of British India (3 vols, London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1817).

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Another consequence of the need to imagine ‘India’ rather than Bengal was the necessity to write in English – for trans-regional communication. And it was this that also facilitated the implicit presence that this chapter talks about: the coloniser as desired eavesdropper, as implicit audience, before whom History was to be staged, in order that he be forced to recognise the logic of the argument. The historical device with which Bengalis imagined both ‘progress’ and the ‘nation’ was the ‘Bengal Renaissance’, later and unproblematically by extension, the ‘Indian Renaissance’39: a glorious civilisation that had fallen into decay had emerged to recapture some of its former glories in the modern period, through the activities of certain Bengali ‘Renaissance intellectuals’ – the social reformer Raja Rammohun Roy being a central figure in this revival of ancient learning. Part of the ‘renaissance’ process was the engagement with progressive ideas from the ‘West’, in the light of which the progressive elements of the ancient past could be reassessed and reappropriated. The ‘renaissance model’, of course, casts the British as patrons and catalysts of this revival of learning: engagement with ‘progressive’ ideas leads forward to the reassessment of tradition in the light of the new ideas, and British legislation, desired or demanded by Bengalis/Indians, puts in place the preconditions for a modern, progressive society.40 Certain problems become apparent. The ancient and glorious civilisation that was being revived was a ‘Hindu’ one by default, one could say, because ‘Hindu’ functioned as a residual category, embracing all those who were not Muslims, and there were no Muslims in those early days. Therefore, not everyone who imagined this glorious ancient past had to be a sectarian anti-Muslim. Many contemporaries of Rammohun tended to oppose him for his attacks on ‘tradition’; it is doubtful whether their version of ‘tradition’ or Rammohun’s reinterpretations of ‘Hinduism’ as monotheism, and his denunciations of Trinitarian Christianity as superstition were any less driven by an engagement with the coloniser; those who engaged at all with these debates were in fact engaging with the coloniser. Retrospectively, Rammohun’s own intellectual background in Persian and Arabic education, and his easy switch from Persian traditions of intellectual

39 Some contemporaneous accounts refer to a ‘Reformation’; this analogy seems not to have lasted very long, perhaps because it seems to apply to religion, while many reformers thought of themselves as attempting a transformation of society and not merely religion. See Amiya P Sen (ed), Social and Religious Reform: the Hindus of British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), Introduction. 40 As revisionist historiography began to point out from the late 1960s: the question that was raised was whether a ‘renaissance’ could properly occur under alien rule and through imposed ideas. See Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India.

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disputation to English ones, makes it difficult to unproblematically claim him as a ‘Hindu’; indeed, it was as an apostate that his contemporaries among ‘Hindus’ reviled him. On the other hand, this might make it possible to claim for him an ‘authenticity’ as a genuine link-figure to a precolonial past – but it is not the Perso-Arabic tradition that facilitates the transition from ‘Bengali’ to ‘Indian’ among the bhadralok intellectual, but a ‘Hindu’ one. ‘Hinduism’, with its implicit and explicit exclusions, solved the ‘nation’ part of the problem. It could be a way of imagining continuities with an ancient ‘India’, revitalised by Bengali ‘Renaissance’ figures for ‘modern’ ‘national’ use; and for those left out, that problem was to be left unresolved: regional or other particularities were to be projected onto the ‘Indian’ nation as a whole, whether others liked it or not. Retrospectively, again, a certain ambivalence comes to light: if the ‘traditionalists’ are to be cast as early cultural nationalists, opposing British penetration into the inner sphere, then Rammohun must be cast as a collaborator with colonialism, inter alia inviting foreign legislation to intervene in sorting out internal problems. This problem has never altogether been resolved. (It was in fact conventional to attribute Muslim ‘backwardness’ to their resistance to the new ‘Western’ education and their continued reliance on ‘traditional’ education, religion and ‘superstition’; but if such engagement appeared eventually and led to a reiteration of the glories of a ‘Muslim’ past, it is to be noted that this was not celebrated by most Bengali Hindu intellectuals as ‘progress’.)41 What about ‘progress’? Here, indeed, was a problem that was related to the ‘national’ question: collective progress had to be made towards ‘nationhood’. The difficulties of imagining a nation have always been that the form is expected to be universal, while the content must be unique, expressing the particular and ‘indigenous’.42 So while trying to squeeze perceptions of identity into criteria of ‘nationalism’ (and here the right to recognise what constituted a ‘proper’ nationalism remained with the coloniser as custodian of the criteria of nationhood), the content still had to satisfy the need for ‘indigenism’ – important to those imagining their own identities. Therefore, to imagine ‘progress’ as not foreign, but indigenous, or at least acceptable by indigenous standards, it was necessary either to imagine those tendencies that were declared ‘progressive’ by the coloniser as already existing in ‘indigenous’, precolonial history, or to appropriate elements of the foreign as universal rather than ‘Western’. Both manoeuvres were undertaken; the latter was popular among those who felt that the reiteration of ‘tradition’ was merely

41 See Pradip Datta, Carving Blocs. 42 See Introduction.

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reactionary rather than productive. The trick was, of course, once such ‘progressive’ tendencies were recognized, to claim that Bengalis/ Indians/ the ‘East’ got there first. This was the important manoeuvre of indigenisation and universalisation at one and the same time, as we can see below, in a scientist’s and a socialist’s formulation that was strategic and polemically useful in his argument with ‘indigenists’: It is probably not so well known that the East has originated all those arts and crafts which are responsible for the greatness of the present European civilisation. It was in the East that copper was first discovered from its ores and used to replace tools made from stones. The East has used bronze which is far superior to copper for offence, defence, and work, upto 1200 B.C. It was again the East which first showed that iron by special treatment could be converted into steel, a product far superior to bronze for fighting and tool making. Even the use of mineral coal originated in the East.43

And yet, the importance of metropolitan ideas in this process remained central. ‘Progressive’ tendencies were often recognised as such through criteria or principles that the colonial power recognised as valid. These were often principles that had already secured political and/or academic respectability in Britain – that is, whose legitimacy was reinforced by their prior status as valid principles in the metropolis. In all this, the coloniser, though not directly addressed, is palpably present.

5 The Histories: Writings So far, what we have is a typology, an invitation to a rereading that does not, perhaps, fully do justice to any particular piece of writing. And since typologies work by oversimplification, it is important to try and test the argument against actual writing. Let us attempt to enter this story through a text that is in many ways exceptional; but it may be an illustration of the old cliché that exceptions can prove a rule: Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray’s Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist.44

43 Meghnad Saha, Science and Culture IV, 10 (April 1939), editorial, p 535. 44 PC Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist (2 vols, Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, 1932–1935) [hereafter Chemist and Chemist II]. I have dealt with this text in some detail elsewhere: Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Chemistry of a Bengali Life’, in Crispin Bates (ed), Beyond Representation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp 322–352. The problem of such textselection, invariably, is that the reader is asked to accept on trust that it is a representative text – since my justification for selection is worked out in the other piece, I shall not try to provide a long justification here.

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Ray’s self-avowed purpose in writing his memoirs, when he was already a celebrity with an international status as a scientist (thereby providing sources of self-respect to Bengalis/ Indians) was to get the ‘youth of India’ to act constructively in the service of the ‘nation’. In doing so, he wished to use his life as an example worth emulating. Ray’s retelling of his life story is set against the history of Bengal in particular, and India in general; it therefore has a lot of Bengali history in it, from immediate pre-colonial times to the time of writing. Ray’s didactic urge, of course, requires him to cast himself as a ‘progressive’. As a result, he takes issue with a number of trends in Bengali/ Indian public life; it is these engagements that make it possible, by reconstructing the social and political milieux of his intervention, to read a wider picture into this text rather than merely the opinions of its author. Ray therefore provides himself details of his life that, if writing in Bengali, he might have called his parichiti – a word which encompasses a range of meanings from ‘acquaintance’ to ‘identity’ (though the latter word would not have carried the overtones it now does in social scientists’ language). To provide one’s parichiti enabled another person to place you in a social, familial and cultural context – perhaps in terms of caste, affluence or status, perhaps in terms of geographical origin. Ray provided himself a parichiti that was quite subversive of the social grid in which his readers might have placed him without it. He was born, he tells his readers, in the district of Jessore (now Khulna), in 1861, (he is careful to stress his East Bengali origins), near a village which was the birthplace of the famous poet Madhusudan Datta (whose sonnet to Bengal we have already encountered above). They were a family of small zamindars, landholders according to British Indian legal codes, although the term had had, prior to British rule, no proprietory implications. Ray’s father, born in 1826, learned Persian (then the court language) and a little Arabic from a maulavi, whose influence ‘completely changed his mental outlook’; he even ‘used to partake secretly of the savoury dish of chicken curry’ with the maulavi, which would have ‘shocked and scandalised’ his orthodox Hindu family, had they known of it (he would have lost his caste status). He had the benefit of an ‘English education’. However, he did not complete his education, as he had to return to look after the family estates while his father took up a government post. Ray also suspected that one of the reasons for his father’s being called home was the young Madhusudan Datta’s conversion to Christianity, which had led to a nervousness on his grandfather’s part that the ‘heretical notions then preached by the alumni of the old Hindu College’ might lead his father to ‘renounce the faith of his ancestors’.45

45 Ray, Chemist, pp 1–2.

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In order to make sense, this stream of details needs to be set against the history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Bengal; certain details are taken for granted by Ray as familiar. The book contains tales which related Ray to a ‘progressive’ Bengali genealogy, that of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’, a connection he makes explicit later in the book, when he refers to his father’s and his own Brahmo Samaj connections – the sect of reformers founded by Rammohun Roy.46 The book is also full of tales of ‘the old Hindu College’, with which the history of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ was intimately connected.47 One might therefore assume that this was a book written for an audience familiar with this history – a Bengali audience who identified positively with this history. And yet, despite this, there is the omnipresent imperialist-as-superego. Comparisons with British history are frequent; it is necessary for Ray to establish that Bengalis have a comparable history to that of Britain. It is also extraordinarily important for Ray to establish his credentials as a man well-read in English and European literature, and as a man who writes well in English. Two interrelated questions may be addressed here: the engagement with Britain as a ‘progressive’ force, and the ‘renaissance’ analogy for the history of Bengal. There is definite ambivalence towards Britain and the British in Ray’s writing. On the one hand, the British are to be greatly admired; on the other, they are to be resisted as conquerors and as racists. He recalls with approval his father’s comments on Sir Colin Campbell, whose great patriotism led him to sacrifice leisure and family life in order to suppress the Mutiny of 1857–58. This was ‘a remarkable incident which our young men would do well to lay to heart’ – apparently, patriotic duties ought to be fulfilled, and if an Englishman’s patriotic duty was to suppress an Indian revolt, the patriotism involved ought nonetheless to be admired.48 The inherent racism of colonial rule is taken for granted, only occasionally inviting comment. The extreme difficulty in getting into the Imperial Education Department as an Indian in his day (c. 1888), and the dependence on the patronage of a European for those who managed to break this barrier, looms large in his memoirs.49 Discrimination against deserving Indians is also juxtaposed against instances of Europeans recognising Indian talent. The experience of colonial rule is thus divided into the tale of the good Englishman and the bad Englishman; but in either case, and this is of course implicit rather than explicit in Ray’s narration, the one with the ability to endorse the capability of the Indian

46 Ray, Chemist, pp 30–31, 39, 42, 146–7. 47 For details of the history of Hindu College, see Zachariah, Chakraborti and Ray, ‘Presidency College, Calcutta: An Unfinished History’; Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India. 48 Ray, Chemist, p 27. 49 Ray, Chemist, pp 73–4.

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is the European; the Indian does not, for all practical purposes, exist on his own; he exists only in the eyes of the European perceiver. There is recognition of the injustice of this situation, but very little possibility of escape from it. Such recognition also expresses itself in the language used. Ray notes with some pleasure that an English passenger on board the ship he took to Britain (he read chemistry at Edinburgh University) hinted at his use of rather bombastic English – he gladly confessed to his being ‘a little fond of the Johnsonian style’.50 To demonstrate his qualifications as a literary gentleman, his text is laced with quotes from Herbert Spencer, Diogenes, the Gymnosophists, the lines of Lancelot Gobbo – as well as Gandhi.51 Ray’s engagement with the phenomenon of the ‘Renaissance’ is ambivalent: he attributed the ‘intellectual renaissance in Bengal’ to the efforts of Rammohun Roy and Thomas Babington Macaulay, and agreed with James Mill that the ‘Hindu’ mind was capable of great metaphysical subtlety but deficient in practical skills. Where science should have flourished as a result of the ‘ferment all around’, ‘[u]nfortunately, the Hindu intellect, lying dormant and fallow for ages, was overgrown with rank weeds and brambles’.52 Of Macaulay he wrote, ‘Macaulay’s famous minute (1835) was in no small measure responsible for the intellectual renaissance of India, however much neo-Hindu revivalists may take offence at some of the passages in it’.53 (This was of course the famous ‘Indians in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinion, in manners and in intellect’ statement of Macaulay’s.) Three years later, in the second volume of his memoirs, he used the same Minute of 1835 as a quote to begin a chapter deploring the Bengali’s imitative tendencies: adopting European dress, customs, manners, and consumption patterns, embodied in tea, tobacco and automobiles.54 Ray mentions his Brahmo Samaj membership as part of his progressive credentials, and seems to regret that his father had failed to marry a widow.55 He recounts his father having told him that in earlier times Brahmins used to eat beef.56 A definitely provocative tone is evident in these passages, in which the pretensions and the sensibilities of conventional, and conservative, Hindu society (which he regards not as conservative but as ‘revivalist’, neo-Hindu and inauthentic), and the Brahmo Samaj’s separateness from it, are emphasised. There was in

50 Ray, Chemist, p 50. 51 Ray, Chemist, pp 52–6. 52 Ray, Chemist, pp 140–42, 147. 53 Ray, Chemist, p 142. 54 Ray, Chemist II, pp 333–43. 55 Ray, Chemist, pp 79–82, 85. 56 Ray, Chemist, p 28

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fact a certain amount of ambivalence in the Brahmo Samaj’s own ranks as to whether to think of themselves as reformist Hindus, but nonetheless Hindus, or whether to see themselves as a separate faith.57 The Brahmo Samaj’s being distinct from Muslim society would not have been a point worth taking up: it would have been self-evident. But Ray was equally keen not to be seen as anti-Muslim.58 We should also note the complexities of Ray’s inclusions and exclusions; at times the exclusions are on the basis of Bengaliness, as when Banias (traders or businessmen) and upcountry Muslims are seen as a problem in Bengal.59 Bengali Muslims, for Ray, were unquestionably to be included in the category ‘Bengali’60– which was for him the necessary intermediary category through which to imagine ‘India’. Ray did not argue that there were no differences between Hindus and Muslims; merely that these differences ought not to result in conflict – and he rejected the contention that Hindus and Muslims in Bengal were different ‘races’: most Muslims were converts from Hinduism due to the ‘very democratic character of Islam as also its absolute freedom from the curse of untouchability’.61 The prajas, subjects or tenants for whom the good zamindar was expected to care, were, as everyone knew, and certainly in East Bengal from where Ray came, most often Bengali Muslims. The Marwaris, a trading and entrepreneurial caste from Rajasthan in Western India, were part of the problem of the decline of the Bengali that greatly exercised Ray62; but their productivity, and the lack thereof in the Bengalis, were commented upon.63 This framework does not altogether fit the general pattern outlined above; but it does provide a sense of who Ray was arguing with. Many of his colleagues and close associates did write books and articles that were hostile to Muslims, 57 It is interesting that this debate assumed significance over the issue of the legality of Brahmo marriages, in which one section of the Samaj objected to the necessity to state that one was not a Hindu. PC Mahalanobis, later renowned as a secular left-winger who in some accounts was almost a communist, was particularly keen that Brahmos were allowed to define themselves as Hindus. See Ashok Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp 43–45. 58 Ray, Chemist, p 71. 59 Ray, Chemist, p 105. 60 Ray, Chemist II, pp 85–103. 61 Ray, Chemist II, p 97; see also Chemist, p 502. 62 Ray, Chemist, pp 89–90. As Pradip Datta has pointed out in Carving Blocs, pp. 55, 59–62, there are inconsistencies in Ray’s position, with an apparent distrust of Muslims alternating with an apparently more sympathetic position, as expressed in his memoirs (published in 1932), and where the unacceptable outsiders appear to be the Marwaris – who, it might be added, though Datta does not mention it, are nonetheless admired for their drive and entrepreneurial zeal. 63 Ray, Chemist, pp 16–17.

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usually in terms of the commonplace view that a glorious Hindu past had been disrupted by Muslim invasion. These drew strongly on conventions of metropolitan academic writing in their references to and mixing of the categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Aryan’.64 Ray did not use this tactic; unlike many of his contemporaries he was able to avoid a situation in which his historical quest turned into ancestorworship and sectarianism. His History of Hindu Chemistry, the first volume of which was published in 1902, is read, largely by virtue of its title, as evidence of his attempt to glorify a Hindu past.65 It does nothing of the sort.66 And unlike Ray’s fellow scientist and colleague, Jagadish Chandra Bose, who tried to reconcile modern scientific practice with ancient Indian (Hindu?) philosophy (largely encouraged in this quest by Margaret Noble, the Irishwoman and Theosophist later known as Sister Nivedita),67 Ray remained sceptical of the ancients’ ability to discover the modern before modernity was conceived. The problem – if one might call it a problem – that Ray’s writing is faced with is that it becomes impossible to bridge the gap between ‘Bengali’ and ‘Indian’ without a simple leap of faith, because he denies himself (for the most part) the resort to the bridge category ‘Hindu’ as an unproblematically positive or glorious concept (which of course makes it impossible for more than half of the Bengalis to make it across the bridge). But that leap must be made. Ray simply invites his readers to make the leap with him: In these days of awakened national consciousness, the life story of a Bengali chemist smacks rather of narrow provincialism. . . . It will be found, however, that most part of

64 On the ‘Hinduness’ of science and civilisation in India, and their decline from the time of the ‘Muslim conquest’, see PN Bose, A History of Hindu Civilisation During British Rule (3 vols, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Truebner, 1894–6); Benoy Sarkar, Hindu Achievements in Exact Science (New York: Longman’s, Green & Co, 1918). 65 Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry (2 vols, Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co, 1902–08). 66 For a detailed analysis of this text and the debates surrounding it, see Dhruv Raina, ‘The Young P.C. Ray and the Inauguration of the Social History of Science in India (1885–1907)’, Science, Technology and Society 2, 1 (1997). 67 See Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (2nd edn, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) (1980). This indicates that a simple ‘Western/ Eastern’ dichotomy would be wholly inadequate to characterise the engagement with questions of science and culture that preoccupied people then; unless it can be argued that Bose’s turn to Hindu philosophy via the Theosophists makes his Hinduism a ‘Western’ Hinduism – but this is to say that the Theosophists’ Hinduism was ‘Western’. All this is polemical rather than useful – this is a polemic that Ashis Nandy himself uses, for instance in his Preface to the new edition of Alternative Sciences, though he avoids it in the text, written earlier.

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the subject matter is applicable to India as a whole. Even the economic condition of Bengal applies mutatis mutandis to almost any province in India.68

Ray managed, by this conscious act of projection, to avoid making the implicit projection of ‘Hindu’. In later historiography, the problem of the Bengali-Indian jump is often lost; but it was at times acknowledged in earlier writing. To some extent the problem had to be acknowledged: as late as in 1950, the historian Jadunath Sarkar wrote in his Foreword to an edition of Niharranjan Ray’s Bangalir Itihas (1949), that this great work ought to be published in abridged form in simple Bengali, as well as in an abridged English version. ‘Then the historians of other parts of India will have a model for the composition of the histories of their own peoples such as does not yet exist in the literature and historiography of this nation.’69 Thus the (singular?) ‘nation’ of ‘India’ comprised ‘peoples’ who had all to write their own histories. In P. C. Ray’s writing, as we have noted, one can observe a confrontation with the trends around him. Ray’s avoidance of the ‘glories of ancient Hinduism’ formula is particularly significant because he was close to both Benoy Sarkar and P. N. Bose, who did just that: P. N. Bose had been his colleague at Presidency College, the successor institution to ‘the old Hindu College’ (he was in the geology department) and Benoy Sarkar was prominent in the Swadeshi movement in Bengal (c.1905–08), which stressed ‘national’ self-reliance, and for which Ray’s company, Bengal Chemicals, was an inspirational institution.70 But the facilitation of ‘nationalism’ via ‘Hinduism’ was by far the most common manoeuvre. In 1920, the Bengali, Radhakumud Mookerji, at the time Professor of History at Mysore University, wrote in his book Nationalism in Hindu Culture: ‘ . . . no student of early Indian history could deny the marked triumphs and achievements of the Hindu genius in the domain of mental, moral, and spiritual progress’.71 If the book has an argument, it is that the Hindus were always a nation. Mookerji’s earlier work on the history of Indian shipping provides an instance in which the ‘national’ and the ‘Hindu’ could be put out of joint. This book was used in a live political-economic dispute: the Bombay industrialist

68 PC Ray, Chemist, p (vi). Emphases in original. 69 Jadunath Sarkar, ‘Foreword’ to Niharranjan Ray, Bangalir Itihas (1949); in Niharranjan Ray, A History of the Bengali People (Ancient Period), new and abridged translation by John W Hood (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1994). 70 See Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj 1857–1905 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 209–11, 213. 71 Radhakumud Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1921), p 1.

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Walchand Hirachand wished to challenge the monopoly of coastal shipping exercised by his British (Scots) rivals, and he used Mookerji as an intellectual ally – Mookerji’s History of Indian Shipping justified Hirachand’s position by referring to India’s glorious past of shipping and maritime commerce. (Mookerji here could abandon an altogether ‘Hindu’ framework because part of that glorious history was the history of Parsi – Zoroastrians originally from Iran – shipbuilders.)72 This is a typical example of a text addressed to a colonial audience as well as being part of an internal debate: the case put forward was the one of the coloniser as an agent of destruction of indigenous industry. And yet, in advertising the book, the publishers resort to an endorsement from Vincent Smith – now widely regarded as a historian of limited ability, but then the author of the Oxford History of India, and a proponent of the colonial civilising mission.73 Smith’s letter to Mookerji was reproduced in the advertisement: If I live to bring out a third edition of my Early History [of India], I shall not fail to make use of the new material supplied by you.. . . But I fear that there is little prospect of renewal of Indian ship-building on any considerable scale. The old wooden ships are gone for ever and the economic conditions of India are not favourable to the creation of the business of building steel steamers. However that may be, you have done good service by placing on record in scholarly fashion a full account of India’s old world achievements in the shipping line.74

Now here was an endorsement of the ‘scholarly’ side of a book along with a deliberate undermining of its political argument. In balancing these rival claims, it had obviously been decided that Smith’s endorsement of the first was important enough to risk undermining the second. (Publishers’ decisions will have had a role to play in this, of course; but the release of a personal letter to Mookerji by Smith would have required the former’s active cooperation.) At least Smith had some claims to expert knowledge in the field; an earlier work by Mookerji on ‘Hindu’ India and its alleged ‘fundamental unity’ had been endorsed by the Labour leader and future Prime Minister of Britain, Ramsay Macdonald, who could not have known much about the contents of the book.75

72 Radhakumud Mookerji, A History of Indian Shipping and Maritime Activity from the Earliest Times (London: Longman’s, 1912). 73 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Chapter 2. 74 Prafulla Chandra Ray and Prabadhchandra Chattopadhyay, Rasayanik Paribhasa [in Bengali] (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Pustak Mandir, 1912), advertisement for A History of Indian Shipping on back pages, reproducing Smith’s letter from Oxford, dated 7/6/12. 75 Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources). With an Introductory Note by the Right Hon. Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P. (London: Longman’s, 1914).

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But to return to the point: writing that, to a greater or lesser extent, consciously rejected ‘Western’ incursions into ‘indigenous’ ‘culture’ simultaneously illustrate a clear and agonised engagement with categories such as ‘Western’. Such an engagement, because it is an engagement, could hardly be somehow purely Indian and therefore ‘different’.

Conclusions: Hurreebabu and the Royal Society The discerning reader might have spotted one ray of hope in the story so far. One way to sift from the colonial encounter its potentially ‘progressive’ elements without laying oneself open to the charge of inauthenticity was to treat these elements as universals rather than as alien elements. In such a reading, it is only coincidentally that these elements come from the ‘West’. This brings us back to why Hurreebabu wants to be a member of the Royal Society. The Royal Society was the ultimate endorsement for a man of science available at the time. This would admit him to a universal category – overcoming the disabilities of being a Bengali/ Indian scientist (by implication inferior) and turning him into just a scientist, without the qualifying adjectives. For Kipling, the imperialist, this is somehow ridiculous (he doesn’t quite tell us why). We now have an answer: the Universal Man is always imagined as white, although this is never stated. For the non-white man (or the woman) to claim that the universal applies to him (or her) is somehow subversive. But access to that universal can only be claimed by forcing the coloniser to acknowledge that right of access – according to the coloniser’s principles. This is sometimes recognised by the colonised as insulting. But it is a political fact. Equally, comforting invocations of an ancient glorious past were only genuinely comforting if the colonisers had to acknowledge that this past had indeed been glorious. The satisfactory breaking of this circle, a resolution of this dilemma, was only possible within a Marxist framework. In this reading, the ‘progressive’ aspects of colonialism had nothing to do with the conscious aspects of the coloniser’s transformative projects: the coloniser was up to no good; but by breaking down the old society, he paved the way for a new and better one.76 Of course, not every Bengali bhadralok intellectual engaged positively with Marxism. But here was a potential resource for those who had always been

76 Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, reprinted 1974), pp. 35–37.

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uncomfortable with the backward-looking glorification of the past: the ‘progressives’ could at last draw on an intellectual genealogy that would not lay them open to the accusation of being alien outsiders. Or could they? Marxists were often accused of importing an alien ideology unsuited to the ‘native genius’ of the country . . .

Chapter 4 National Hinduism In the course of the previous chapters, the category that has been imposing its presence on this book has been ‘Hinduism’; and it should be clear that it is impossible to proceed without confronting it. What work does the category ‘Hindu’ do for, or in, the ‘national’? Is the problem of what constitutes ‘Hinduism’ one merely of terminology? Is ‘Hinduism’ a ‘modern’ concept, an ancient religious identity or a modern political movement? Is it a set of practices, a textual tradition, or a collective umbrella term for a wide range of divergent things? And possibly more importantly, what is the work done by the set of claims made for ‘Hinduism’ in the colonial period? The questions of when what we now know as ‘Hinduism’ came into being, or indeed whether it exists or existed at all, or perhaps whether we are forced to acknowledge its existence because those who believe it does exist are so vocal and aggressive about it, refuse to go unanswered. This, on the one hand, is a very public debate. On the other hand, there is an increasingly loud academic debate on whether ‘Hinduism’ as we know it is a colonial artefact or invention, or if it has continuities with practices and doctrines in the precolonial past. It seems we might be working at the very least with several Hinduisms, which is of course not unusual when it comes to anything that has remotely been close to claiming the category ‘religion’, or having such claims made on behalf of its imagined collective practitioners. The debate, then, may boil down to a matter of etic categorisation versus emic recognition, in which case it might indeed be relevant to find particular dates for the emergence of particular terms. There are many possible irrelevances that we might chase in this way. In part, then, the debate on what constitutes ‘Hinduism’ has been cast as one about terminology: the ‘ism’ is obviously a suffix that comes from the English language; the ‘Hindu’ part is old Iranian, then Arabic, has the same etymology as the Greek ‘’Indoi’ and was more geographical, at least in early usage, than religious in connotation;1 and in some later uses, a name-change from ‘Hindustan’ to ‘India’ itself signified a change in the way the politics of identifying the geographical entity operated.2 Alternatives have been proposed, which are those that contemporaries at various points under discussion would 1 See BN Mukherjee, The Foreign Names of the Indian Subcontinent (Mysore: Place Names Society of India, 1989). 2 IJ Barrow, ‘From Hindustan to India: Naming Change in Changing Names’, South Asia 26, 1 (April 2003), pp. 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-005

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themselves allegedly have recognised (this includes, for more recent times, ‘Hindu’ with the suffix ‘-ta’ or ‘-tva’, but excludes ‘Brahminism’ on the grounds of the ‘ism’, though some would argue that the ‘ta’ and ‘tva’ suffixes were themselves inauthentic neologisms despite their Sanskritoid etymology).3 Among the candidates for the contemporaneous would be Saiva, Vaisnava, sampraday, etc., to denote sects that were often violent and hostile towards each other and did not think of themselves as sharing anything like a common set of beliefs, doctrines, practices, books or worldviews.4 This leaves behind an agonised debate as to what constitutes the core of the-whatever-we-like-to-call-it-that-is-the-religion-that-existedon-the-Indian-subcontinent-that-goes-back-a-long-time. Some argue that there has never been an identifiable core, and that it has been put together in retrospect.5 These are often people with a strong stake in the politics of opposition to the Sangh Parivar. There are others who claim that there is a core that has existed for a long time, and at least since the twelfth century, where it was even called ‘Hindu’, however much the term might have been merely geographical before.6 In the main, these are often Orientalists, or Indologists, suitably renamed or uncertainly named after the post-Saidian debate that debased their name, who like to have a name for what they study. This is an oversimplification, of course, but these polar positions define the ground for debate. If there has never been something that has collectively been considered Hindu (choose your preferred suffix here) in religious or doctrinal senses (pedants would point out that ‘dharma’ doesn’t translate as ‘religion’ very easily, assuming we know better what a ‘religion’ is, meaning something like ‘way of life’, ‘path of duty’, ‘law’, ‘custom’, or ‘conduct’ instead), the reason for studying it as a religious formation is pointless. If we need to have a big picture on what it is, perhaps we need to ask whether it was because it was available for use as an axis along which to invent or structure a national entity, that its

3 David Lorenzen rather impatiently writes that quibbling about terminology rather than the thing itself doesn’t get us very far. David Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 4 (October 1999), pp. 630–659, reprinted in David Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism? (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006); see p. 3. The trouble is, the terminology is itself contested on political grounds, which makes it important to separate terminological disputes from thing-in-itself disputes while acknowledging the political importance of both. 4 DN Jha, ‘Destereotyping Hinduism’, lecture at the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, August 19, 2006; DN Jha, Rethinking Hindu Identity (London: Equinox, 2009), Chapter Two: ‘Tolerant Hinduism: Evidence and Stereotype’. 5 Heinrich von Stietencron, ‘Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term’ in GD Sontheimer and HD Kulke (ed), Hinduism Reconsidered (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), pp. 11–27. 6 e.g. Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’

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existence as a unified collective entity has been claimed. Then there is the question of relevant chronology: the terms used in connection with it have shifted considerably at different points. And the question of retrospective claims: at various points, there have been claims made about Hinduism with serious political implications. These claims have also been the subject of debates about history and by historians, not to mention archaeologists and linguists. Many of these claims have been sharply political; many have been crucially concerned with finding resources in the past untainted by colonialism to restore in a notionally purified post-colonial future. This chapter asks instead when the category ‘Hinduism’ was invested with the meanings it now has: religion, textual sources, finite doctrines, national identity. More specifically, it is an attempt to study the stages of preparation of the category for national use. ‘Preparation’ need not suggest instrumentality; as the previous chapters indicate, the resort to ‘Hindu’ is not necessarily intended as a conscious act of exclusion (though it sometimes is), but it becomes a plausible basis for a positive identification of the ‘precolonial’ ‘national’, when it becomes important to identify and to identify with the ‘national’. This approach, of course, somewhat avoids the question of Hinduism’s ‘precolonial’ presences or multiplicities, if we take all of these together rather than separately. The ‘precolonial’ is itself a problematic, flat, and retrospective category, for which generalisations cannot and should not be made. It seems, then, strange how important the category has become, often even among those who wish to reject the hegemony of colonialism in the writing of Indian history. The purpose of this chapter is not to focus on doctrinal, sectarian or theological debates, of which they were many, nor on the precise chronologies of various social formations that called themselves or can retrospectively be recognised as ‘Hindu’, but to examine some of the political, social and economic contestations that occur(red) around the category ‘Hinduism’, and especially those that related to the use of Hinduism as a national resource. It is intended as a commentary on an ongoing debate, and a potential agenda for further research. What it is not, however, is a conspiracy theory (‘the British invented Hinduism to mislead the people’), or a contribution to a polemic that seems to operate by deliberately misreading opponents’ views. Since this book has already stated its opposition to categories such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’, there is nothing much to be gained from the argument that what was once thought of as fundamentally ‘Indian’ or ‘eastern’ is actually neither. It might be nonetheless important to begin to trace the social and intellectual history of a set of very influential ideas that helped structure the allegedly authentic ‘national’ in India. The chronological framework of this chapter, thus, is not linear from the ancient to the present. It is colonial, reaching back to various stages of the

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precolonial past (depending on the debate) and postcolonial. We could identify the beginning of our story in the eighteenth century, in colonial times, and pick up crucial moments in which a number of questions emerge in varying combinations: of the political, emotional and/or ideological investments in the category ‘Hindu’, in the transformations of that category for political use, and its connections to metropolitan arguments that give it strength and validity. One further point that has already made its appearance in this book and will reappear later needs to be underlined here. While ‘Hindu’ and its relative expressions were never fully ‘national’, because their multiple meanings spread well beyond the disciplining framework of the imagining of an Indian ‘nation’, or a future Indian state, the ‘national’ in the Indian case was extremely reliant on one or another version of the ‘Hindu’.7

1 The Argument The narrative that I present here, run backwards and oversimplified to provide a teleology rather than a genealogy, is that ‘Hinduism’ was completed and properly available for modern political use after Gandhi’s fast and the Poona Pact in 1932. This is when the boundaries of political Hinduism get fully drawn, and backed up by legislative authority in the 1935 Government of India Act, colluding inadvertently (the oxymoron is deliberate) with census operations.8 Thereafter, the ‘Who Is a Hindu?’ question is not one of arguing about definitions, but working with a reality backed by legislative authority; and without incorporating ‘untouchables’ or ‘Harijans’, along with ‘tribals’, the claim that ‘Hindus’ were or are a majority in India cannot be numerically upheld. Until then, ‘Hindu’ is a residual category that means either non-Muslims, or those without clearly defined

7 This is different from the argument that only the wrong sort of nationalism is so dependent. For a version of this argument, applied in conventional Marxist mode mostly to the Swadeshi period in Bengal, and based on an argument about the ‘inhibited and deformed’ development of capitalism in India, therefore on the continuity of ‘pre-capitalist’ aspects of ideology, see Horst Krüger, ‘Hinduism and National Liberation Movement in India’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (ed), Hinduism Reconsidered, pp. 81–92. Krüger sees the survival of caste as the central indication of the survival of ‘pre-capitalist production relations’ and ‘ideology’ into the modern period. 8 Michael Haan, ‘Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–1921 Indian censuses helped operationalise “Hinduism”’, Religion 35, 1 (January 2005), pp. 13–30, hedges his bets: he looks at emerging definitions of ‘Hinduism’ through the census, but concludes that ‘Hinduism’ is both a colonial construct and a precolonial reality.

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faiths (unless they can claim caste status within the upper three varnas, in which case the question of faith becomes irrelevant). However, and this has been said many times before, a crucial period of contestation that gives us a ‘Hinduism’ available for political use is the late nineteenth century, when ideas of Aryanism, race, culture and religion were run alongside ideas of nation and nationalism, intermingled with each other, while also borrowing terms and categories that had resonances in metropolitan or European usage. Here, perhaps, some attention to languages of legitimation might be of interest. Some attention, too, might be given to a history of crucial politicised ideas and their uses in specific contexts: something akin to a Begriffsgeschichte, or a history of important terms and categories in Indian political life, is useful.9 Unfortunately, much of this work is nationally circumscribed (or at least circumscribed in terms of the shared language of a relatively coherent group), and cannot deal properly with questions of translation and of the use of certain terms outside their allegedly ‘native’ context: Begriffsgeschichte of individual countries, Holland, Britain (England or Scotland or Wales), Ireland, etc. might miss the propensity of ideas, not necessarily reducible to the terminology that claims to carry the ideas, to travel across contexts.10 Of related interest is Peter van der Veer’s argument about the ‘colonial-Orientalist dynamic’, in which internalised conceptions of British Orientalism, in its pre-Saidian sense, return to political debate among the colonised, in some cases with a suitably shifted normative framework, in order to legitimate a sometimes nationalist project of self-strengthening.11 The argument, then, is about whether there is a ‘core’ to Hinduism: generations of books on the ‘ism’ have reified it and given it a sometimes quite spurious

9 The connections between languages of legitimation and the Skinner-Pocock school of historical semantics has been alluded to earlier; and on Begriffsgeschichte, the work of Reinhart Koselleck is paradigmatic in this regard, as is the large project that bears the name Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. See Introduction; see also Benjamin Zachariah, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 140–143. 10 An assessment of the possibilities of Begriffsgeschichte from the early 1990s stumbled on this point: ‘the extraordinary difficulty of translating the meaning of terms and concepts from one language into another, from one cultural tradition into another, and from one intellectual climate into another’: Detlef Junker, ‘Preface’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (ed), The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute Occasional Paper No. 15, 1996), p. 6. The problem seems to be one of trying too closely to map terminology onto content. This of course would apply to the term ‘Hindu’ as well. 11 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of Californai Press, 1994).

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coherence, even if they have done it differently.12 Recent attempts by historians of early India to problematise legends such as that of a coherent ‘Hinduism’ (which most people now recognise as an anachronistic or at least an etic category), or even a ‘Brahmin’ ethos (to attempt a more emic category), have found an academic audience despite attempts to blackmail or intimidate the writers: D. N. Jha’s material on beef-eating by Brahmins across several centuries from early to medieval India, and Romila Thapar’s carefully iconoclastic writing, might be taken as good examples.13 The recognition that ‘Hinduism’ was, either as a whole, or in its parts, neither coherent nor unified, that it was violent, sectarian (with various sampraday taking up arms against each other, and normative texts extolling the virtues of Vaishnavas killing Saivas), has of course brought into public debate some uncomfortable details in terms of both Indian and post1960s (or perhaps post-Theosophical) European and North American myths of Hindu non-violence and spirituality. It is of course still possible to argue that there was nonetheless a ‘core’ despite these violent (internal) differences, but a glorious and relatively harmonious past does not emerge from this material. There remains also the tension between practices, as historians can discover, and normative frameworks. These normative frameworks have been allowed to masquerade as practices (which of course are notoriously difficult to identify for the distant past), and have been reified in many cases through the good offices of the British, who sought finite texts with which to understand

12 See Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Chris Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (revised edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) [1992]; TN Madan, NonRenunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), despite their different focal points: Madan even admits, in his Preface to the paperback edition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), that he is talking about ‘the Brahmanical tradition’ (p ix). The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar simply assumes the identity of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ in publication after publication. See Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981) [1978]; Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Delhi: Viking, 1989). 13 DN Jha, Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions (Delhi: Matrix, 2001), Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), Romila Thapar, Early India: from the origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Romila Thapar, ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modern Asian Studies 23, 2 (1989), pp 209–231; Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); for predecessor arguments, see Romila Thapar et al, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (Delhi: People’s Publishing House 1969); DD Kosambi, Myth and reality: studies in the formation of Indian culture (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962); DD Kosambi, The culture and civilisation of ancient India in historical outline (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

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the minds of those they sought to govern. This question has been obscured in recent years by a mostly futile debate about the role (or collusion) of the native informant in the creation of that form of ‘colonial knowledge’ that became the basis for governing the ‘native’. This is sometimes a somewhat subtler version of the conservative argument about ‘collaborators’ with imperial rule that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, and is perhaps still prevalent in some bubbles of academia.14 It is also sometimes an argument about the importance of restoring the ‘agency’ of the colonised subject in the making of ‘colonial knowledge’, or in structuring his own subjection. (A sort of obligatory etiquette has taken hold of the academic world, in which it is the height of bad manners not to attribute ‘agency’ a priori to anyone; to say that ‘man makes history, but not in circumstances of his own choosing’ is simply not done if one wants to have access to the best circles.)15 The question of the discursive structure of the argument into which ‘knowledge’ is placed – within paradigms that the ‘informant’ could in many cases not have had access to – is often not adequately raised. Indeed, the question, if you like, of the agency of the native informant, and the possible manipulation by that informant, or subversion by him (usually him) of the implicit projects of those he was informing, arose only in a situation when the colonised could speak the language of the coloniser, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Thus, a Rammohun Roy could fluently present his cases in terms either of Christian theology or the language of liberalism; he wrote also in Persian, and this material might yield further insights into his ability to write in several social and political idioms, with different audiences in mind and therefore in different languages of legitimation.16 Whether this would make him a Christian theologian or a liberal is a question that is difficult to answer: the inner self and its convictions and intentions are not necessarily accessible even to the self, let alone the retrospective reader. Commentators

14 See in particular CA Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael S Dodson, Orientalism, empire, and national culture: India, 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 15 ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ This is the oft-quoted line from Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01. htm, accessed 19.08.2019 – though how this works in an argument based on a ‘break with tradition’ due to colonial rule, and in cultural and linguistic translation, again complicates matter. 16 See Sumit Sarkar, ‘Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past’, in Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), pp. 1–18.

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have been less than satisfactory in explaining why he turned to monotheism and unitarianism in his English writing; an interesting question on the subject might relate to intended audiences and his ability to frame an argument within a language of legitimation that would reach those audiences. If Rammohun was interested in influencing legislation (and we know he was), he needed to be able to access the language that would influence legislation, that would have resonances with an administration that spoke that language. There remains a related question: that of the class inflection (or social stratification) of various frameworks that we retrospectively might lump together as ‘Hinduism’.17 If there is indeed a core to ‘Hinduism’, retrospectively named but (semi-)eternally present, there is nonetheless an importance to the multiplicity of meanings contained in the name(s) that enable ‘Hindu’ to have resonances across a good number of contexts;18 and those meanings need to be explored specifically for each context. Our question here is what sorts of belief systems – what sorts of meanings of ‘Hindu’ – became available for political use and what sort did not; and perhaps this is a question of the resonances of ‘Hinduism’ in a modern sense with the political languages of nationalism, race and racial destiny that became crucial to the late nineteenth century. This, like it or not, is an elite discourse, or at least a middle-class one: popular forms of religious belief and social organisation do not centrally come into the picture.19 How, then, does ‘Hinduism’ become a category that interpellates – shouts ‘Hey, I’m talking to you’ at – elite Indians seeking frameworks of self-fashioning and political selfexpression?20 How, in turn, do nineteenth century trends in romantic anticapitalism interpellate the colonial subject? And how are these trends fashioned into

17 It may not be productive here to get into discussions about the use of ‘class’ as a historical category in the Indian context or more generally; there is always a tension between a class in itself and a class for itself (Marx) and the idea of a status group (Weber); caste always comes into the picture in India, and the debate continues as to how far caste is transmuted into class. Perhaps the simple and provisional answer that we can have here is that caste and class are nearly congruent on the upper rungs of the social ladder, but the metaphor starts to unravel if we note that the ladder itself has several branches and sub-branches at the lower levels. 18 For a statement of this case, see Arvind Sharma, ‘On Hindu, Hindustan, Hinduism and Hindutva’, Numen 49 (2002), pp. 1–36. 19 Elite/popular is here a provisional formulation that needs to be contextualised in specific cases to make sense – this remark is by way of distinguishing myself from the elite/subaltern dichotomy in which both terms are mutually dependent residual categories, and hence can lead to circular arguments. 20 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 11–44.

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the political neo-Hinduism that we come to know so intimately in colonial Indian politics? This of course leaves space for the argument that not all forms of Hinduism come to have a central presence in the political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Let us examine an element of this multi-layered beast that is ‘Hinduism’ as an example of this problem. Does the sadhu sitting on the ghats smoking ganja really engage with the politics of a bharatiyata, or is his world different? William Pinch looks at the moment of the ‘political sadhu’ and his connections with peasant society – a problem that centrally enters Indian politics in the 1920s with Mohandas Gandhi and with Swami Sahajananda as competing figures for the loyalties of peasants in a politics of anticolonialism. In particular, Pinch focuses on the eighteenth century and the importance of the Ramanandi sampraday’s recruitment practices, reformist agenda, and engagement with issues of social change and inequality. The connections between religion, religious belief and popular participation in politics, especially peasant politics, are at the core of these concerns.21 Pinch is concerned that both religion and caste have not been given enough of a space in the history of peasant consciousness and peasant politics. He views these not as colonial construction, which applies less, he says, to peasant consciousness of their own condition (and as jati rather than varna, a lived category of actual status rather than the normative category of high Sanskritic texts) and in any case more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And he believes that religious motivation is only looked at in exceptional rather than everyday situations. He explicitly discounts this work as meaning something about ‘Hinduism’ in general, which he accepts is something that was ‘influenced in part by European attempts to understand Indian religion according to European paradigms, in part by a nationalist movement that sought to draw on noncontradictory religions meanings, and in part by religious reformers who sought to reconcile regional religious contradictions so as to participate in the emerging Indian political discourse of nation and race’.22 However, he draws connections between the trends he describes and the overall political culture of north India. The routes opened up for lower caste recruits to the Ramanandi order to claim and adopt kshatriya origins then become central to a more assertive political culture that also looks back at history to claim genealogies from ancient and valorous kshatriya kings and warriors; but the explanation of the decline of the kshatriya starts to depend upon a narrative of the destruction of sacred royal

21 William Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 22 Pinch, Peasants and Monks, p 21.

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lineages by Muslim invader; this tendency, amplified by the printing press and supported by British historical interpretations of India, had plenty of sectarian potential.23 In some ways, this argument draws on the Subaltern Studies group’s early invocation of the peasants’ ‘autonomous domain’ away from elite politics of all types,24 as Pinch’s operative categories are vaishnava, bhakti, Vishnu and his avatars. Pinch seeks to draw away from this simplistic ‘autonomous domain’ argument himself, and commendably so.25 Chris Bayly’s references to political powers that were not states in the eighteenth century, which would include militant and arms-bearing sadhus but also Jat raiders of the area around Delhi, are also possible comparators to Pinch’s study.26 But these descriptions of some non-colonially invented aspects of the multi-layered beast, of course, do not amount to what is required of a Hinduism that becomes available for nationalist use. The sadhu or the naga as militant proto-nationalist has of course been invoked by various trends that sought to fashion a nationalism for India: Bankimchandra in Bengal thought the sadhu could be invoked as the authentic figure of resistance to British rule, refashioned as Muslim rule, both being able to stand in for one another by being ‘foreign’.27 As a nationalist icon, of course, the sadhu or the sanyasi is ambiguous; it provides a link to an allegedly earlier India untainted by colonial rule, and therefore it provides the resources of authenticity, but the sadhu cannot be claimed as a fully modern element of the projected nation-state without some important modifications. Even if the sadhu is interested in politics, what role does he really play in nationalist politics? The Baba Ramchandras of the peasant movements of the 1920s were successfully marginalised and/or appropriated by the Congress and other groups, who could better speak the language of politics required in a colonial setting; the holy man is more useful to nationalist politics – as opposed to anticolonial politics more generally, where he might well have a role – as symbol than as reality, or in other words, the discursive sadhu of nationalism might bear no resemblance to the actual sadhu, or might be recast, for instance via Gandhi, as a necessary icon who must be translated for national use. The continued resonance in a colonial context of the sadhu-

23 Pinch, Peasants and Monks, pp. 141–2. 24 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–8. 25 Pinch, Peasants and Monks, pp. 147–8. 26 CA Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 27 Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Anandamath, translated from the Bengali by Julius J Lippner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [1882].

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sanyasi figure has been explored, in particular for Bengal, for instance in the life of the Bhowal sanyasi,28 the importance of Ramakrishna Paramhansa or his (Bengali bhadralok) disciple Swami Vivekananda,29 naturally in much work on Gandhi,30 and in the intellectual-terrorist-turned-ascetic, Sri Aurobindo,31 not to mention in the engagement with bauls and fakirs by relatively affluent and usually urban intellectuals;32 the collective point that might well be made here is that all these figures are less about some sort of ‘authentic’ (non-elite, ‘innocent’ and precolonial, in Ashis Nandy’s terminology)33 behaviour and much more about their providing resources for middle-class arguments. It might bear restating that for the purposes of this argument I am not interested per se in the question of restoring the ‘agency’ of the sadhu as historical actor, ‘organic intellectual’ or non-nationalist-but-anticolonial-subject – unless as emblem of and himself a manipulator (‘agency’?) of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ – but in types of engagement with categories that are definitely in our times (modern times) called ‘Hindu’, though not all of which are available for political use in the same sense. In any case, the diversity and problematic nature of sadhus and sanyasis in terms of their lives and actual practices, in particular their non-conformity with norms of civilised social and sexual behaviour, make them only partially available for nationalist purposes, as a system of ‘national’ values inflected with colonial-era concerns about appropriate behaviour for the ‘nation’ could not easily accommodate them.34

28 Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Impostor? the strange and universal history of the Kumar of Bhawal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 29 See Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and his Times’, in Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 282–357; on the movement as a whole, see G Beckerlegge, The Ramakrishna Mission: the making of a modern Hindu movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 30 Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), is the best work to deal with the bodily aspects of the Mahatma’s politics. 31 Peter Heehs is the best non-mystical commentator on Aurobindo. See his recent biography: Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 32 Jeanne Openshaw, ‘The Radicalism of Tagore and the Bauls of Bengal’, South Asia Research 17, 1 (Spring 1997), pp. 20–36; Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 33 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 34 Similar anxieties are recorded by Tapati Guha Thakurta in attempts to deal with the erotic in Indian art. Tapati Guha Thakurta, Monuments, objects, histories: institutions of art in colonial and postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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Figure 4.1: Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta) (1862-1903), international Hindu missionary. Signed photograph, c. 1893. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The usefulness here of the sadhu-sanyasi figure is in its ability to allegedly embody ‘authenticity’ while various uses of the category Hindu are conflated and confused. Fundamentally, then, the sadhu-sanyasi figure does the work that ‘Hinduism’ does at a wider level in nationalist argument: ‘Hinduism’ becomes a code for indigeneity, authenticity, authentic indigeneity, which every nationalism must have. This is not necessarily only in consciously sectarian argument: Hindus (as opposed to the complicated, questionable indigenous position of Indian Muslims, Parsis, Jews, etc.) can provide the ‘ancient-traditionworth-reviving’ and/or the ‘already-modern-ancient’ trope far better. Different aspects of ‘Hinduism’ might be highlighted to be presented as the ‘core’, depending on the type of nationalist manoeuvre made by various protagonists in the debate, as they become selectively useful for making some larger claim to authenticity in a particular context. This is where the importance of the 1932 moment can be properly contextualised. The Poona Pact is the key moment that suddenly incorporates the ‘backward castes’, dalits, as Hindus, and really positions Muslims as not properly indigenous. This is contradictory as far as the importance of Gandhism to an eventual India is concerned: on the one hand, it is always alleged that Gandhi’s ideas do not properly make their way into the creation of an Indian state; on the other hand, his contribution to defining ‘Hindus’ is enshrined in legislation, even though it is initially British legislation, and it is what finally makes ‘Hindus’

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politically and therefore practically a single entity. Once this conflation is achieved, the sadhu has, without knowing it, become one with the Indology professor at Oxford and future President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. At this point, the categories Hindu and Muslim are counterposed to each other.

2 British Discoveries, Native Informants: Manoeuvres, Reifications, Reiterations, Modifications and Reappropriations A few reminders of the opening of the confrontation of what has come to be called ‘colonial knowledge’ and the ‘indigenous’ might be attempted here. These categories, as they appear in the literature, are of course reified ones even when the polemic points out that ‘colonial knowledge’ is a product of ‘indigenous agency’ through the figure of the ‘native informant’. Peter Marshall’s anthology on the ‘British discovery of Hinduism’ is instructive in its insistence that British views of Hinduism bore no necessary resemblance to Hinduism itself35(as indeed no ‘Hindu’ view of Hinduism bore any necessary resemblance to Hinduism itself). In fact, the coincidence of the urge to knowledge and the needs of governance are amply borne out by codes of ‘Gentoo laws’, the ‘customs’ of the natives, their ‘religion’, ‘priests’, etc. It has of course been pointed out that the need to reconcile the new knowledge of the strange peoples of the colonies with a Biblical worldview was paramount in structuring the new knowledge, as pre-evolutionary thinking had to treat human beings as emerging from their common ancestors, Adam and Eve;36 the Hindus became the Gentiles of Biblical fame, and the continuation of ‘Hindu’ as a residual category in thinking about India was assured for a longer time. The discoveries of the common origins of ‘Indo-Aryan’ languages by William Jones and others had to be mapped onto a ‘Mosaic ethnography’, to use Thomas Trautmann’s phrase, with the sons of Noah providing an overarching framework for linguistic and racial genealogies, the two seen as congruent.37

35 See PJ Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), introduction. See also William Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the study of Indian religions, 1600–1776 (Halle: Verlag der Fränckeschen Stiftungen, 2003). 36 PJ Marshall and G Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British perceptions of the world in the age of enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982). 37 Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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‘Caste’, on the other hand, that analogy brought to India from the New World by the Portuguese, was given its major shapes by the activities of colonial institutions, in particular by census operations, which insisted on attempting to map conceptions of varna, the alleged ‘great tradition’, onto the ‘little tradition’ of jati, thereby providing in the course of time a form of social mobility. ‘Sanskritisation’, the ability to claim higher caste and therefore social status by adopting the customs and mores of higher castes,38 was at its moment of success something that was written down in the census. The crude version of this argument is that ‘caste’ was therefore entirely a European invention; the allegedly subtler version of this being that ‘caste’ was a collaborative project between Europeans and their native informants. Nicholas Dirks points out that the argument was not that Europeans invented caste, but that caste was always responsive to political power rather than providing an unchanging and static grid39; and that therefore caste, as it emerged in the colonial period, was something very much interlinked with colonial politics, which of course included coloniser and colonised.40 A related debate is about Hinduism as a textual tradition: if, as the seekersafter-knowledge-for-administrative-purposes believed, religions had sacred books, they merely had to find the right ones; and the race among pundits to provide the British with sacred books for their purposes, as is well known, turned out many fakes as well as many texts whose actual presence in any really existing social or religious practice was difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, a collection of texts was anointed over the years and centuries after the eighteenth century, which were then reified as the ‘core’ of ‘Hinduism’, and had consequences such as in the founding of ‘Hindu law’, or in the construing of Hindu/Indian society in terms of Brahmanical knowledge backed up by British political power.

38 See MN Srinivas, Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford, 1952) for his coining of the term; see also MN Srinivas, ‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’, Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4 (August, 1956), pp. 481–496; MN Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 39 Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993). 40 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). The argument that caste emerged in the forms that become familiar in the colonial period more under late Mughal rule than under the colonial order, even if accepted, makes the not dissimilar point that caste was not an ancient and immutable set of institutions, written in sacred books and upheld by societies at large. See Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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The great ‘Orientalist-Anglicist’ confrontation was of course driven by contending efforts to characterise ‘India’ among various groups of British administrators.41 James Mill, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, noted what he saw as the tendency among Indian informants, . . . to attach to the loose and unmeaning phraseology of some of their own writings, whatever ideas they find to be in esteem; or even to interpolate for that favourite purpose. It was thus extremely natural that Sir William Jones, whose pundits had become acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe, should hear from them that those ideas were contained in their own books: The wonder was that without any proof he should believe them.42

Mill’s polemical purpose is of course well known, and much ink has been spilled accounting for the pernicious effects of his and his fellow Anglicists’ denigration of past Indian civilisation, and his historical periodisation of India’s ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, and ‘British’ periods. But here he addresses the problems of translatability and compatibility of languages of legitimation tracking one another: according to Mill, the native informants were well placed to elaborate the ideas that they wished to see anointed as the dominant ideas that drove ‘Indian’ society in terms of European ideas that were held in high regard. This, if you like, is Mill’s stumbling upon the Rammohun Roy principle. This is not of course to suggest with Mill that Rammohun was, or others were, merely instrumental in his or their use of ideas; but in a public domain that, for a multilingual elite, encompassed the domestic and local as well as the far-flung and international, engagements with ideas that might be retrospectively considered ‘foreign’ can hardly be seen as surprising. For the less educated ‘native informant’, the refractions might have been greater had they been interpreting European philosophical vocabulary, finding equivalents in their own vocabulary, and rendering it back to the Orientalists in terms of the former vocabulary. But as in the case, for instance, of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s ‘Gentoo laws’43 or William Jones’s Biblical narratives,44 the importance of the framing discourses and their effects on the natives’ information is obvious. ‘Colonial knowledge’, then, is not produced without the contribution of the colonised, but s/he makes this knowledge not in circumstances of his/her own choosing. 41 Martin Moir and Lynn Zastoupil (ed), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Related to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 42 James Mill, The History of British India [abridged version, 1817]; (reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 223–4. 43 Marshall, The British discovery of Hinduism, pp. 140–183. 44 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 28–61.

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In acquiring ‘agency’, therefore, the native might be informed by the native informant via his colonial mediators. To take an example that only partially renders unto us the category ‘Hindu’ might be informative here. The long life of the ‘ancient Indian village community’, unchanging, static, the basis for ‘Oriental despotism’ and the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, is a case in point. Now considered the quintessential Orientalist (in the extended, Saidian sense of the term) image of Indian society, it was also once an empowering idea, allowing people with a sense of grievance at having been colonised to invent a space untouched by foreign powers of any description, where the true ‘nation’ could survive, regenerate, revive and re-emerge.45 The genealogy of this moment has been traced in some detail by now, starting from Sir Charles Metcalfe’s invocation of ‘little republics’ in 1832, through Karl Marx’s readings of Sir Charles Wood’s pleas in the House of Commons over the renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1853, through Henry Maine’s comparative jurisprudence from the 1860s, and onward to anticapitalist romanticism or romantic anticapitalism in India and in various forms. Marx of course contrasts political turbulence caused by the imperial impact to Wood’s image of social continuity (and in Marx’s view, stagnation): the imperial impact was already breaking down these self-sufficient communities, and capitalism would come about not because of imperialist good intentions, but in the manner of the pagan idol ‘who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain’.46 By the time one Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi got hold of the idea of the ancient Indian village community in the early twentieth century,47 it had therefore had a long history in the public domain. The first Finance Minister of independent India, John Matthai, wrote his doctoral dissertation at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Sidney Webb on the subject, not

45 Ronald Inden, Imagining India (London: Hurst, 2000) [1990], pp. 131–142, makes the point that it was considered an ‘Indian’ ‘essence’. 46 The complete quote reads: ‘When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain’. Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, written July 22, 1853, first published in the New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853, https://marxists.catbull. com/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm, accessed 28.01.2020. See also Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, written June 10, 1853; first published in the New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, reprinted 1974), pp. 35–37. 47 MK Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1909), in AJ Parel (ed), Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge: Polity, 1997).

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long after Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, though Matthai made less use of the theme himself in later life than Gandhi did.48 Gandhi came across Henry Maine’s Village Communities of the East and West, included in the short bibliography at the end of his Hind Swaraj,49 in the course of his legal training in London in the late 1880s and eary 1890s. Maine himself drew on his Indian experiences and on accounts of the ‘Indian village community’, which had been influential in early Orientalist accounts.50 Gandhi was far from being the only Indian to come up with a romanticised account of ‘village India’; the rural community ordered as an ideal and harmonious society, and the privileging of an indigenous past before it was defiled by invaders appears, for instance, in the works of the sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee and the historian Radhakumud Mookerji, both of whom were interested in the alleged unity of ancient (and Hindu) India, which would justify its re-emergence in the present.51 The debates with which Henry Maine was concerned – the origins of the Teutonic Mark and the Russian Mir, could, he felt, be illuminated by a study of the Indian village community, already shown to be closely related to a common ‘Aryan’ past through the comparative philology begun by William Jones, and popularised, in the Oxford of Maine’s day (Maine was at Cambridge), by Friedrich Max Mueller.52 This debate had an analogous version in Russia, and became the scholarly basis of the Narodnik movement, which then spawned its own debate on the authenticity of the ‘East’ versus the ‘West’: in this case, the Russian East had to avoid employing non-indigenous categories imported from the developed West.53 This was a position associated with Tolstoy, who closed

48 John Matthai, Village Government in British India (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1915). 49 Parel, ‘Introduction’, to Parel (ed), Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, p xlii. 50 On Maine see JW Burrow, Evolution and Society (1970 edn; 1st edn Cambridge, 1966), pp. 137–87; Inden, Imagining India, pp. 137–140. Maine had outlined his first major contribution to his field, Ancient Law, before he had ever been to India; he elaborated these ideas in his Village Communities of the East and West, published in 1871, with his Indian experience behind him. 51 See for instance Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1916); Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (London: Oxford University Press, 1919); Radhakumud Mookerji, The Unity of Ancient India (from Hindu sources) (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1914). 52 Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp 141, 148–9. 53 Burrow, Evolution and Society, p 159; Clive Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies 6, 3 (1972), pp. 291–328, for a concise account of the Russian situation, in particular the Narodnik-Marxist divide, see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 1–18. Narodnaya Volya defended the ‘indigenous’ Mir as the basis of action, and attacked the emergent Marxists as outsiders and Westernisers. The ‘Marxists’, on the other hand,

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Figure 4.2: Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), German Sanskritist at Oxford, and idol of Indian nationalists. Photograph by Alexander Bassano, 1883. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

the circle of these circular arguments by writing in his diary upon reading Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which the latter had sent him as a token of respect: ‘Read Gandhi about civilisation, wonderful’.54 Again, a potential village community as a basis for socialism, rather than as antithetical to the ascendancy of an industrial working class, can be found in Vera Zasulich’s famed correspondence with Marx towards the end of the latter’s life,55 and perhaps in the

referred to the Mir as a bulwark of absolutism; the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had given the responsibility for periodic land redistribution to the Mir. 54 Tolstoy’s diary, entry for April 20, 1910, quoted in Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1973), p 24. 55 Ironically, Marx himself seems to have tended towards accepting the so-called ‘indigenist’ and ‘terrorist’ position of Narodnaya Volya and was suspicious of the ‘Genevans’, as he called the Cherny Peredel group of Georgi Plekhanov, who called themselves ‘Marxists’. Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millenium (London: Pluto Press, 1996), pp. 52–9. Zasulich was of course herself a Plekhanovite. See Karl Marx, ‘first draft of a letter to Vera Zasulich’, March 1881, https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm, accessed 20.08.2019, part of which reads: ‘in Russia, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a nationwide scale, may gradually detach itself from its primitive features and develop directly as an element of collective production on a nationwide scale. It is precisely thanks to its contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may appropriate the latter’s

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Chinese Communist Party’s making a virtue out of necessity after having been destroyed by the Guomindang in their Shanghai bases in 1927.56 In these latter debates, at least, it is not the ‘indigenous’ that is served by a reified village: the Chinese communists did not romanticise or eternalise ‘their’ villages. The authentic village, thus, had many variants in the period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century; it was not particularly ‘Indian’. It has of course now been widely accepted that such a thing as the self-sufficient village community cannot be shown to have had a historical existence.57 However, it is in some arguments by default a ‘Hindu’ or ‘Aryan’ institution in India, especially in its allegedly self-ruling and ‘democratic’ tendency to collective rule by a panchayat of village elders, but is not quite as available for potentially sectarian tendencies as some of the other matters on show at the time. It is, however, an apt example of the changing contexts and fates of an idea, and its ability to appeal to the new protagonists of the ‘national’. And it can be mobilised differently by conservative or radical tendencies: the Gandhians certainly saw it as radical to suggest it as the basis of a possible new society, and at least some contemporaries classified the decentralisation and return to village life as an anarchist tendency. This is a resurrectionist rather than a preservationist argument: Gandhians, when challenged to justify their commitment to ‘backwardness’, were by the 1930s keen to demonstrate that the ‘ancient’ village was not ‘backward’ and was not to be revived entirely in its ancient form, but had to be revitalised to adapt to ‘modern’ conditions.58 If we accept, as we have above, that ‘Hindu’ and its cognate categories resonated with a larger public in some ways despite, or perhaps because of, its

positive acquisitions without experiencing all its frightful misfortunes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world; neither is it the prey of a foreign invader like the East Indies.’ He quotes LH Morgan on the possibility of the ‘“revival in a superior form of an archaic social type”’, and says ‘we must not let ourselves to be alarmed at the word “archaic”’. 56 Conrad Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China 1924–1927 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958); Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (2nd revised edn, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961) [1938]. The victorious Chinese revolution abandoned the village. 57 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘The Mid-Eighteenth Century Background’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri et al (ed), The Cambridge Economic History of India Volume II, c.1757–c.1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3–35, on the so-called jajmani system. See also SP Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); on the ‘mode of production debate’ of the 1970s, though not about the ‘authentic’ village in this version so much as about incomplete transitions to capitalism, see Utsa Patnaik (ed), Agrarian relations and accumulation: the ‘mode of production’ debate in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press for the Sameeksha Trust, 1990). 58 Zachariah, Developing India, chapter four.

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fluid meanings, then we need to get to the larger question: that of the invigoration of that category for ‘national’ political use. We can render this problem in terms of what we might call the revolt of the ‘native informant’ in a number of situations: religion, social ‘reform’, the engagement with the ‘Western’ and the reconstruction of ‘tradition’. We have, however, a certain problematic argument to return to before we go any further: if ‘religion’ is, as it was by colonial officials as well as by many Indian reformers, considered the basis of Indian ‘society’, then what is the distinction between ‘religious reformation’ and ‘social reform’? This, indeed, is something difficult to discern in the writings of the protagonists of religious/social reform(ation): a ‘Hindu’ (later also Muslim and Sikh) society had to be cleansed of its backward or obsolete elements (modernised), returned to its true ‘fundamentals’ (purified), or brought together in a situation that resonated with the norms of a public domain that was increasingly dominated by colonial assertions of proper normative behaviour (civilised). What was therefore necessary was for a politics of reform, that was at least in part performative, to acquire an adequate set of ‘moral languages’59 that could provide the basis for the moral public performances of coloniser-versus-colonised. And if the ‘mystic east’ versus the ‘materialistic west’ was a borrowed dichotomy that could be normatively reversed and used in an anticolonial moral language, this could also be the basis for a claim that a true religiously-informed spirituality that was conducive to a morally superior political order was always preferable to an (allegedly) secularised space provided by ‘Western’ political systems.

3 The Return of the Native: Romantic Anticapitalism, Eastern Spirituality and Aryanism Here, of course, the dichotomies of east and west, and of material and spiritual, become available not least because they are subjects of metropolitan anxieties in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The allegedly secular world of the late nineteenth century could also be represented in the residual spiritualism and Christianity of a Gladstonian morality,60 or a refusal to allow a Charles Bradlaugh to take his place in the House of Commons because of his inability 59 Bob van der Linden, Moral languages from colonial Punjab: the Singh Sabha, Arya samaj and Ahmadiyahs (Delhi: Manohar, 2008). 60 See for instance Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 340–345.

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Figure 4.3: Annie Besant (1847-1933), c. 1897, photographer unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

as an atheist to take an oath before God; his associate Annie Besant was before long taking up the cause of an esoteric religion that had a global following.61 The rebellion against materialism and the attempt to hold on to nobler virtues in Ruskin or the Pre-Raphaelites,62 the anxieties about loss of religion and its replacement with a variety of allegedly scientific attempts to reclaim the magical and the spiritual in communing with spirits beyond the grave, photographing fairies and ectoplasm, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing about science and the intellect as well as taking the secret doctrines of Madame Blavatsky seriously, were all part of the same age.63 By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the search for alternatives to the anxieties of the industrial world had taken India and Hinduism into the realms of metropolitan philosophico-theological discussion, albeit often

61 See Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: a biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Andrew Prescott, ‘“The Cause of Humanity:” Charles Bradlaugh and Freemasonry’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 2003, online at https://de.scribd.com/document/2887354/Prescott-Andrew-TheCause-of-Humanity-Charles-Bradlaugh-and-Freemasonry-2003#, accessed 28.01.2020. 62 John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism (New York: John Wiley & Son, 1865) 63 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). See also Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

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at an amateur level, throughout Britain, Europe and North America.64 By the time Annie Besant encountered Theosophy, she had some years of reading on Hinduism behind her, which she had already begun to use in some of her polemical writings. In 1873, an American, Moncure Daniel Conway, was an extremely popular figure among free thinkers in London, with his lectures on ‘Hindu’ themes, among them on the Bhagavad Gita, some years before Sir Edwin Arnold’s celebrated translation.65 And in the academic domain, Friedrich Max Mueller had brought to Britain something of a vibrant Indological tradition from Germany, merging the question of Aryanism with the study of India in ways that were not yet considered ominous.66 These concerns that sought to illuminate the fast-moving industrial world and make it intelligible, also had an audience in the periphery, even if they were inflected differently as they travelled. The central testimonial that historians of South Asia know well is of course that of Gandhi: his readings of Thomas Carlyle, Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoy67; his engagements with vegetarianism and turn-of-thecentury dissent in London,68 his reconsideration of his ‘indigenous’ past through, among other things, his first reading of the Bhagavad Gita, later to be his central spiritual inspiration, in the Theosophist Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation.69 And it is these resonances in metropolitan arguments that the colonial subject who is able to tune into these debates can focus upon to create the resource that is ‘Hinduism’. Much has been written about attempts by Indian political actors to sift the worthwhile foreign from the destructive foreign from the impact of colonialism, using the dichotomies of ‘east and west’ mentioned above, 64 SN Mukherjee writes that William Jones prefigures this anxiety in his own life and writings. SN Mukherjee, Sir William Jones (Calbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 65 Taylor, Annie Besant, p 63; Sir Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (London: Roberts Bros., 1885). 66 On Max Mueller, see Nirad C Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974); JH Voigt, Max Mueller: The Man and His Ideas (Calcutta; Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1967). 67 Anthony Parel, ‘Introduction’, to Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. 68 James D Hunt, Gandhi in London (Delhi: Promilla and Co, revised edn, 1993) [1978]. On that milieu, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); which is, however, based on a romanticised assumption about the relationship between metropolitan dissent, sexual nonconformity and anticolonialism, and in terms of the political impact of its protagonists, could also be a book named ineffective communities. 69 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai; edn. Harmondsworth, 1982; first published Ahmedabad, 1927); Arnold, The Song Celestial; see also Brooks Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West: Sir Edwin Arnold (New York: Bookman, 1957).

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Figure 4.4: Theosophy begets Hinduism: Annie Besant’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, first published in 1896, eleven years after the version of her fellow Theosophist, Edwin Arnold.

although some of it may do well to note the ambivalence of this attempt at sifting. More to the point might be the trends that enabled the coming together of various strands: romantic anticapitalism across the world, the rise of mysticism and the search for the occult, the continuing significance and increasing political presence of the category ‘Aryan’, and the increasing normalisation of the national principle as one that orders ‘races’ into states. Here, then, is what might well be an agenda for further research, on romantic anticapitalism, spiritualism, Aryanism, Arya Samajis, Theosophy, Gandhi, and more.

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The trend towards effecting a ‘return’ to one’s native practices, accepting one’s natural national heritage, and reviving and modernising it for future use, is one that is extremely present in self-consciously nationalist narratives. These somewhat awkward life-stories are a clue to the difficulty of disciplining a genre of talking about lives in terms of the heroic (auto)biography that takes its heroic mode from the nature of the cause that the hero fights for.70 That the hero absorbs what is best of the ‘western’ or ‘foreign’ world goes without saying, of course; that he realises the ultimate value of his own national civilisation is also well known.71 The author of A Nation in Making begins his story with that of his caste and family lineage, which sits uneasily with the English language and the invoked liberal tropes, but in other respects tells his tale within the unfolding narrative of liberal teleologies of a nation coming into itself.72 Mohandas Gandhi, in the serialised autobiographical essays he wrote in the 1920s, ridicules his own belief in stories of the manly Englishman’s ability to rule the effeminate Indian because of the former’s beef-eating capacities.73 And his deputy in the All-India Village Industries Association, J. C. Kumarappa (previously Joseph Chelladurai), has a slightly different, though structurally similar, narrative of return written for him: the grandson of a priest, he was himself a devout Christian,74 and a late convert to nationalism, apparently arriving at his views on British exploitation of India in the course of his study of Indian public finance at Columbia University in New York. Thereafter he turned his back on his ‘upbringing on English model’, met Gandhi in 1929, began to wear khadi, the handspun cloth that was the moral fabric of Gandhian ideology, and (although he remained a Christian, and enjoyed debating Christian theology with Gandhi) adopted the Hindu family name ‘Kumarappa’. This was not without moments of misreading; turning up at Gandhi’s ashram to indigenise himself, he allegedly asked to be measured for a

70 See David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (ed), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004) for an exploration of the auto/biographical genre in India; the concerns covered there are, however, different from those I refer to here. 71 See also Chapter Three, on Bengali ‘returns’. 72 Surendranath Banerjee, A Nation in Making (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 73 Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, pp. 34–35. 74 K. Muniandi, ‘Kumarappa the Man’, Gandhi Marg 14, 2 (July-September 1992), pp. 318–26; Devendra Kumar, ‘Kumarappa and the Contemporary Development Perspective’, Gandhi Marg 14, 2 (July-September 1992), pp. 294–5; Mark Lindley, J.C. Kumarappa. Mahatma Gandhi’s economist (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2007).

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dhoti, only to be told that dhotis, comprising as they did a single piece of cloth that was tied and not stitched, did not require tailoring.75 This of course is a variation on the theme that the indigenous is foreign: another case study could be provided by the Theosophical Society’s movements in India.76 Theosophists proceeding to India sought out that other proponent of ancient Aryan wisdom, Swami Dayanada Saraswati, and were most disappointed to discover that Dayananda was not willing to lend his organisation and his authority to the infant Theosophical organisation.77 The Arya Samaj had its own agenda, its own propaganda and agitational literature aimed at sections of society that were less easy to reach through the rarefied atmosphere of Vedic authority as propounded in its English language or elite-directed publications. In its training programmes and schools, a new generation of neo-Hindus could be trained,78 and in its more popular literature, its agenda of hatred of Muslims could be propounded in a cruder manner.79 But in its sophisticated version, the Arya Samaj could now draw upon an increasingly well-loved, though perhaps as yet ill-defined, rhetoric of the Aryan Path (also to be the name of a journal run by a breakaway from the parent Theosophical Society, B. P. Wadia’s United Lodge of Theosophists, in India)80; and the Theosophical Society provided Hinduism with a respectable social network in which Theosophists brown and white could together accept the authority of Hindu/Indian scriptures. ‘The Hindu religion, in particular, went up in my estimation’, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in his autobiography about his encounters with Theosophy through Mrs Besant and through his tutor, Ferdinand Brooks.81 Annie Besant had herself been active in the Co-Masons, the Masonic organisation for women; the Theosophical movement in India built

75 The similarity of this tale with that of Gandhi’s own description of his turning away from ‘playing the English gentleman’ may be noted here: see Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, pp. 60–63. 76 For histories of Theosophy, and of Annie Besant, its main protagonist in India, see for instance, Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient wisdom revived: a history of the Theosophical movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); AH Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (London: Hart-Davis 1961); AH Nethercot, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant (London: Hart-Davis, 1963); Taylor, Annie Besant; Catherine Lowman Wessinger, Annie Besant and Progressive Messianism (1847–1933) (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1988). 77 Taylor, Annie Besant, pp. 232–235. 78 Harald Fischer-Tine, Der Gurukul-Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya-Nation: Kolonialismus, Hindureform und ‘nationale Bildung’ in Britisch-Indien (1897–1922) (Würzburg: Ergon, 2003). 79 KW Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 80 Published by the Theosophy Co, Bombay. 81 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head, 1936), p 15.

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on and absorbed Masonic networks and mapped some of the ideas of the two onto one another. Elite Indians whose interest in Theosophy sat well with the networking possibilities of Freemasonry could partake of the same public culture that provided space for Dayanand’s reified Vedas, Nivedita’s neo-Hindu interpretations of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda cult, Annie Besant’s versions of Hindu nationalism. India could now impress upon a world that included Irish nationalists such as William Butler Yeats, or indeed Annie Besant herself as a distant Irish nationalist despite her very English and then Indian life, the common Aryanism of Indian and Irish mythology and therefore national roots.82 Hinduism and Aryanism were coming together and were both translatable and marketable.83 The Theosophists were particularly useful in setting up institutions and social networks that were available for ‘Hindu’ use. Annie Besant, of course, was instrumental in the setting up of the Benares Hindu University, which grew out of her Central Hindu College, founded in 1899, and was later sustained by Madan Mohan Malaviya, funded by the industrialist G. D. Birla, and became the base for Hindu Sabha ideologues.84And Theosophical and Masonic networks were integral to the success of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League activities during the First World War – an aspect of organisational politics that did not escape the attention of the Government of India.85 The Bengali bhadralok-turned-monk Swami Vivekananda provided a visual image to much of this trans-religious excitement with his saffron-clad figure and well-tempered English when he announced the arrival of this world religion at the Chicago World Congress of Religions in 1893.86 The Irishwoman,

82 On Ireland, Yeats and theosophy, see e.g. Mary E. Bryson, ‘Metaphors for Freedom: Theosophy and the Irish Literary Revival’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jun., 1977), pp. 32–40; Katherine Mullin, ‘Typhoid Turnips and Crooked Cucumbers: Theosophy in Ulysses’, Modernism/modernity Volume 8, Number 1 (January 2001), pp. 77–97; Ken Monteith, Yeats and Theosophy (London: Routledge, 2007). 83 J Leopold, ‘The Aryan Theory of Race in India: Nationalist and Internationalist Interpretations’, Indian Economic and Social History Review (1970); J Leopold, ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–1970ʹ, English Historical Review 89 (July 1974). 84 Leah Renold, A Hindu education: early years of the Banaras Hindu University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 85 Government of India, Home Department, Political Branch, File No. 247 & K.W., Part A, March 1917, National Archives of India, New Delhi. 86 The speech can be found, in companionship with other speeches at that conference, in JW Hanson (ed), The World’s congress of religions: the addresses and papers delivered before the Parliament, and an abstract of the congresses held in the Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A., August 25 to October 15, 1893, under the auspices of the World’s Columbia Exposition (reprint: London: Taylor & Francis, 2008) [1894].

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Margaret Noble or ‘Sister Nivedita’, as her now-Indian persona was called, became the interpreter of Vivekananda, and Hinduism, for a wider, and often metropolitan, audience. A sense of the concerns of the Vivekananda circle might be provided here in Noble’s description: From hymns and chanting they [the disciples] would pass into history. Sometimes it would be the story of Ignatius Loyola; again Joan of Arc or the Rani of Jhansi; and yet again the Swami would recite long passages from Carlyle’s French revolution, and they would all sway themselves backwards and forwards dreamily, repeating together “vive la république! Vive la république!”87

It is hard to pin this down to a specific and defined ‘religion’; But a concern with national narratives and nationalism is never too far away. Within this context, much has been made of Rabindranath Tagore’s apparent refusal of the tenets of modern nationalism, after his close encounter and identification with it at the time of the Swadeshi movement. It needs to be said, however, that even the ‘Eastern’ spiritualism of Rabindranath Tagore had a protonationalist feel to it. In his attempts to remain aloof from modern nationalism, his refusal was grounded in his claim that nationalism was not properly suited to ‘eastern’ wisdom and was thus a ‘western’ idea. Such thoughts could also without too much difficulty be drawn into this milieu of mysticism and the quest for spirituality, with the poet and occasional Theosophist William Butler Yeats providing a space for the travel of such Indian spirituality via the poet anointed as a world figure through his 1913 Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore.88 The connections and cross-currents admit of no clear separations: another major figure whose life interlocks with many of these currents is Aurobindo Ghosh, cultural returnee with a vengeance: having been carefully shielded by his father from any knowledge of the Bengali language and of ‘Indian’ culture lest he be distracted from the goal of proficiency in the English language, European culture and a place in the Indian Civil Service, Aurobindo turned from Classics in Cambridge to a strong place in the Swadeshi Movement and the wave of revolutionary ‘terrorism’ thereafter, before retiring into spiritual life as a Hindu sage; Nivedita sought release from her formal entanglements with the Ramakrishna Mission in 1902 to follow a now more appealing and directly political calling alongside this new figure.89

87 Nivedita, The Master As I Saw Him (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1910), p 88. 88 See Michael Collins, ‘History and the Postcolonial: Rabindranath Tagore’s Reception in London, 1912–1913ʹ, International Journal of the Humanities vol. 4, no. 9 (2007), pp. 71–84. 89 In this connection see Elleke Boehme, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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A short methodological reflection on resonances might be provided once again here. In Geraldine Forbes’ rather neglected study on the impact of the Positivist movement in Bengal – among whose followers counted several prominent Bengali bhadralok intellectuals in addition to imperial civil servants said to be somewhat sympathetic to the aspirations of Indian nationalism (a measure of self-government was of course all it meant at the time) – she raises the question of why Positivism was popular in Bengal. Her conclusions are particularly apt: Positivism’s impact on a Bengali intelligentsia was enabled by its stress on an enlightened, morally and spiritually skilled leadership, which of course fitted in well with a Brahmanical elite’s desire to share in political power. She points out that Positivism had little direct impact in its French avatar, instead finding its way to India through its British branch, in English translation, and through the activities of various British Indian officials such as Sir Henry Cotton, whose association with the early Indian National Congress is well-known. Among Bengali intellectuals, there were few who actually became full members of the Positivist movement, but far larger numbers engaged closely with Positivism and cited it as an influence or a legitimating set of ideas in their own writing.90 This illustration works in the other direction as well: the ancient Aryan wisdom theme was influential in securing Theosophy its European and North American resonances, and while connections between these ideas and subsequent fascist or proto-fascist ideals can be overdrawn, the potential significances are impossible to ignore. Then again, the mutually reinforcing aspects of this are obvious: rulers and ruled, as fellow Aryans, could make legitimate claims to equality and neither could affirm primacy, therefore neither could legitimately rule each other. On the other hand, they could collectively rule others.91 The great Orientalist, Friedrich Max Mueller, is another link figure in the growing appeal of ‘Hinduism’ in India via its rise to the status of world religion outside India. As is well known, Mueller had a large fan-following in India

90 Geraldine Forbes, Positivism in Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva, 1975). 91 See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (London: IB Tauris, 2004) [1985], on the Ariosophist movement in Vienna, but see especially pp. 19–29 on the Theosophical connection of German occultism (we might note the teleology of the argument: ‘anticipation’ or ‘roots’ make for difficult historical arguments – in parallel with another argument that is similarly problematic: about the pre-war ‘roots’ of many of the ideas that went into fascism: see Zeev Sternhell, ‘How to Think About Fascism and its Ideology’, Constellations 15, 3 (2008), pp. 280–290). Later books by Goodrick-Clarke deal with post-war matters: Nicholas GoodrickClarke, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998) traces neo-Nazi spaces in India. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), traces post-war neo-Nazism more generally.

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among educated intellectuals, and had an extensive correspondence with them, although he never visited India.92 His set of lectures, India: What can it Teach us? was regarded in India as a vindication of the rights of India not to be colonised, because it was a nation that was part of that great stream of mankind belonging to the same civilisation as the coloniser’s. Max Mueller in fact made a somewhat lesser point in that text: India was not, he said, central to the history of Europe; Europeans, insofar as a study of worthwhile things was a study of one’s own past (and this Max Mueller took for granted), should still study the Greeks and Romans. But India provided at least a major contributing factor.93 He was less than unequivocally enthusiastic about the body of work upon which he made his reputation (although current scholarship would dispute a good deal of the philosophical genealogies contained in these statements): . . . it cannot be denied that the Sacred Books of the East are full of rubbish, and that the same stream which carries down fragments of pure gold, carries also sand and mud and much that is dead and offensive. That many things which occur in the hymns of the Veda, in the Brahmanas, and in the Upanishads also, struck even an Oriental mind as so much rubbish, accumulated, we hardly know how, in the course of centuries, we may learn from the Buddha. His hostility towards the Brahmanas has been very much exaggerated, and we know by this time that most of his doctrines were really those of the Upanishads. But though he would take and retain the gold in the ancient literature of India, he would not accept the rubbish.94

And he went on: ‘. . . even an Oriental mind could not bring himself to admire all that had been handed down as ancient and sacred. Here is an example which we ought to follow, always trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, to prove all things, and to hold fast that which is good.’95 But the common-Aryan-origins theme was already, as we have seen, a central aspect of writing about India, whether or not in a sympathetic tone, at the turn of the last century. The enthusiast for Indian art and culture, E. B. Havell, an associate of and co-promoter of an ‘Indian’ school of art,96 expounded the cause of India as Aryan: 92 On the reception of Max Mueller, see Nirad C Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary, pp. 293–323. 93 F Max Mueller, India: What Can it Teach Us? (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1883). This might well have been a point he needed to make to his audience in Britain. 94 Collected Works of the Right Hon. F. Max Mueller, vol. XVI: Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy. Delivered at the Royal Institution in March, 1894 (New Impression, London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901) [1894], Third lecture, pp. 113–14. 95 Mueller, Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy, Third Lecture, p 115. 96 Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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The description of the old English village communities in Sleswick and Jutland given by a well-known historian, and the characteristics ascribed to the ancestors of the AngloSaxon race, correspond closely with what is known of the early Aryan settlements in India from their literary records and from traditional evidence. The Indo-Aryan resembled the Anglo-Saxon in his detestation of the restraints of city life and his love for the independence which agriculture and the organisation of village communities gave him.97

The key to this book was the common Aryan-ness, and thus the common love of freedom, of ruler and ruled, something that we have noted was not out of place in Henry Maine’s work.98 Havell made a case for self-respect among Indians on the basis of Aryanism. ‘Whether unintentional or not, no greater spiritual injury can be done to a people than to teach them to undervalue or despise the achievements of their forefathers.’ ‘India’s present Aryan rulers’ [i.e. the British] would do well to remind Indians of their glorious Aryan past – the first Aryan conquest of India brought as glorious an epoch as the later Aryan [British] present.99 ‘Indian loyalty’ to British rule is ‘a sentiment which is deeply rooted in IndoAryan religion and in devotion to the Aryan ideal’.100 Here was an attempt to concede the basis of a distinctly Indian identity that Havell, here and elsewhere, was willing to promote as national, no less, though he clearly believed this was not incompatible with the British presence, as benevolent fellow-Aryans. Nor was he unaware of the potential sectarian implications of this idea for the belonging of Muslims to the Indian body politic. He therefore postulated a geographically specific Islam for India. Since most Indian Muslims were, he wrote, converts from ‘Hinduism’, ‘[t]he great development of Islamic culture in India is thus shown in its true aspect as a distinct branch of the Indo-Aryan tree . . . .’101 It is no doubt possible to attempt a subtle separation of the themes that appear in this description to be so thoroughly intermingled as to be an indistinguishable part of a strange Gestalt; but such a separation might well have seemed artificial to contemporaries.

97 EB Havell, The History of Aryan Rule in India (London: George G. Harrap & Company Ltd, 1918), p 3. The ‘well-known historian’ he cites is JR Green, Short History of the English People (London: Harper & Brothers, 1878), pp. 3–4. 98 Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, 1866) [1861]; Henry Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (London : John Murray, 1876). 99 Havell, The History of Aryan Rule in India, p viii. 100 Havell, The History of Aryan Rule in India (ix). 101 Havell, The History of Aryan Rule in India (xvi).

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4 The ‘Hindu’ as ‘National’: A Lingering on a Well-Known Argument We can see, therefore, a number of things coming together: the discovery of an ancient and glorious past, that included arguments about Aryans and their achievements, leading on to the achievements of ‘Hindu science’, the connections among ideologies of ‘Swadeshi’, of ‘Science’, of the consideration of ‘Hindu’ achievements, and of the genius of the ‘eastern’ mind, as for instance in the writing of Jagadish Chandra Bose in his later life, as he attempted to reconcile Hindu philosophy and modern science, urged to do so by Sister Nivedita.102 Among other prominent figures were Pramatha Nath Bose,103 or Brajendranath Seal,104 who wrote on Hindu science, its brilliance in the ancient Hindu past and its degeneration under Muslim rule; an exception was the chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray, who avoided the ancient-Hindu-achievement trap in his History of Hindu Chemistry, despite the fact that it was written in 1903 and 1908 at the time of the Swadeshi Movement, and that Ray himself was a prominent Swadeshi entrepreneur.105 One way or another, ‘scientific’ idioms borrowed from state-of-the-art ‘Western’ academia were mobilised in attempting to provide legitimate forms for Indian imaginings of a ‘nation’; though not all these ‘scientific’ idioms were recognised by practitioners of science to be scientific by the standards of the time.106 Various conflations, then, became important to the resonances that ‘Hindu’ was to have by the turn of the century. A number of questions have to be raised in reference to the use of the category ‘Hindu’. What did it mean in relation to the debates on ‘nation-building’, ‘race’, or (later) eugenics?107 What have questions of language politics to do with ‘Hinduism’? Are ‘Urdu’ and ‘Hindi’ separate languages? What is ‘Hindustani’?108 In all these cases, what was in dispute

102 Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 103 Pramatha Nath Bose, A History of Hindu Civilisation During British Rule (3 vols, Calcutta: W Newman, 1894–1896). 104 Brajendranath Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1915). 105 Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry (2 vols, Calcutta: Bengal Chemical & Pharmaceutical Works, Ltd, 1902–08). 106 This distinction is ignored in Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 107 Zachariah, Developing India, Chapter Five. 108 Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Christopher King, One

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was not so much the nature of ‘Hinduism’ in the sense of custom or faith (because of course many of these debates were not about matters of custom or faith at all), but about what is worthwhile to celebrate in the service of a present and a future ‘national’. We should pause here for breath and note that most of the networks and persons considered above fit only awkwardly into that set of writings on South Asian history that qualifies them as ‘communal forces’. We should also note that there was little possibility of getting away from any engagement with the category ‘Hindu’ even if one was not searching for a sectarian definition of India. On the other hand, colonial Indian politics already had a language of legitimation that excluded a resort to an argument that could be called ‘communal’. Political and social groups had to find legitimate categories outside ‘communalism’ to define themselves or define their activities, for instance, in terms of their defending ‘community rights’ or ‘minority rights’, which were considered acceptable. ‘Communal’ could however, be used to refer to the policies and activities of other groups. This has now found its place in a historiography that speaks not of nationalism versus communalism in the old sense, but of ‘Hindu nationalism’, though still juxtaposed against a (more inclusive) Indian nationalism; and, as mentioned before, the distinction does not work. As for the work that considers ‘secularism’ not to be possible in the Indian context, there the question is one of defining ‘secular’ across various contexts; this can also become a non-debate.109 But then there is a question that recurs throughout this chapter: the readings here are resolutely elitist; they rely on translations and responses to metropolitan debates, and cross-engagements between colonial elites and metropolitan concerns. And the general argument is that the resonances of these arguments with a wider public relied on the polyvalence of the category ‘Hindu’. On the other hand, there is little good evidence that this wider public related to the category ‘Hindu’ as a national category, or, in other words, that they saw it as meaning loyalty to a ‘national’ entity. This is a line of argument that is in consonance with a ‘dominance without hegemony’ position that the ‘national’, or indeed the colonial-induced transformations of India, never achieved hegemony among ordinary people. This may be carrying the argument too far, of course, but there is no

Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001). 109 See Chapter One.

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good evidence that when ordinary people were said to be ‘nationalist’, they actually were. An argument for post-independence India is that the post-independence state was willing to admit its failure to achieve this sense of collective belonging, despite having attempted it.110 And yet, any claim to collective legitimacy on the part of any non-elite group had to be made through a claim to a share of national resources on the grounds of belonging to the state, or in the colonial period, of having a place in the nation, or indeed retrospectively, of having had a place in the anticolonial struggle, as qualifying for national belonging. The incorporation of the ‘people’ into a national project, however defined, was not on the basis of creating a sense of belonging to elite-defined national spaces. It may be that, as recent work has begun to show, a lower-level secondary and vernacular-writing elite also had a sense of the national that was inflected differently, though still in terms of the ‘Hindu’, that then was more successful in reaching an audience of non-elite participants: the Arya Samaj’s more aggressive and populist propaganda, for instance, or the circulation of supposedly ‘Ayurvedic’ pamphlets that spoke of the importance of the body of the individual as contributing to the body of the nation111– a parallel (although not exactly ‘autonomous’) discourse to that of the eugenics that might have been debated in the Congress’s National Planning Committee or the Government of India’s medical services.112 It is difficult to be sure how these ideas actually spread, and ‘autonomy’ is a difficult argument to make, just as ‘derivation’ is never perfect. One thing is clear: ‘subaltern agency’ would be a mythology to invoke in this regard. So it is fair to say that whether it was a bilingual or a vernacular, and probably relatively lower-level, elite that carried national ideas, it was they who sought to guide the ‘masses’, or to claim to do so and thereby establish their own claims to the ‘nation’. And if they did not succeed in actually establishing their hegemony, they at least attempted to make the ‘national’ the framework of legitimate public communication. The question is, however, not if anyone ever truly believed in a national ideology, but whether it could appear as if they did so. So the ‘public’ had not just to be spoken to: and even if it was not being spoken to, it had to be created and defined, or produced for display in a national project. And this was, to a large extent, a numbers game.

110 Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 111 Rachel Berger, ‘Ayurveda and the Making of the Urban Middle Class in North India, 1900–1945’ in Dagmar Wujastyk and Frederick M Smith (ed), Modern and global Ayurveda: pluralism and paradigms (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 101–116. 112 Zachariah, Developing India, pp. 248–252.

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5 The Numbers Game Who, technically, was a ‘Hindu’? The fact that the categories of caste, religion, community, faith and so on, have had something historically to do with the attempted administrative organising of the colonial census, has long been known.113 Until the Census of 1871–72, ‘Hindu’ was equivalent to ‘not Muslim’, and therefore a residual category; the derivation was not unreasonable. Thereafter, the category belonged to only those who professed the Hindu faith. Still this remained unclear – ‘semi-Hindu’ versus ‘Hindu’; ‘animist’, ‘tribal’, etc., remained categories that permeated the census-takers’ operations. A ‘pure Hindu’ tended to be of the ‘Aryan’ stock; and ‘Aryan’ was automatically ‘Hindu’. The question of faith was thus to be asked of non-‘Aryans’.114 Census operations in India were, as is well known, prized opportunities for administrator-anthropologists to do some fieldwork, and their categories and categorisations proved remarkably long-lived, with present-day Indian administrative categories often being based on no more than minor modifications of these antiquated moments in nineteenth-century racescience. The Census Commissioner for 1901 was proud that this census had enumerated ‘the wild Nicobarese and Andamanese’ for the first time.115 ‘In all Provinces much attention was paid to religion and ethnography’.116 The chapter on ‘Caste, Tribe, and Race’ paid much attention to the emergent discipline of anthropometry117; and much was made of the alleged congruence of race and caste, which was said to provide good material for anthropometry.118 Nonetheless, just in case it was thought that the Census was merely a playground for anthropologists, it was made clear that: [O]ur object is not purely scientific. The costly and laborious operations of an Indian Census can only be justified by their direct bearing on the actual government of the

113 Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, reprinted in Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and other essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–254. 114 See the history of the census’ categories provided in HH Risley, Officer of the French Academy, Corresponding Member of Berlin Anthropological Society, and EA Gait, Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Anthropological Secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report (Calcutta: Government of India, 1903), pp. 489–557. For a study of the politics of census categorisations over a longer period, see Sumit Guha, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003), pp. 148–167, especially pp. 157–159. 115 Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report, p x. 116 Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report, p xxv (Risley). 117 Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report, pp. 489–557. 118 Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report, p 496.

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country. The Census presents a series of pictures of the national history of the past ten years; it sums up the effects of the vicissitudes of the seasons – of religious and social movements, of educational effort, of commercial and industrial progress. It enables the rulers of India to take stock of their position and to see how it has fared with the people committed to their charge. For the current decade it fixes the statistical data on which all administrative action must be based. It tells the governing body what manner of men they have to deal with; how many will suffer from a failure of the rains or will benefit by a well-conceived scheme of irrigation; what are the prospects of a new line of railway; what proportion of the population will be reached by a reduction of taxation; to what extent an over-worked government can be relieved by a transfer of jurisdiction, and, what interests will be affected by the change.119

It did not question, however, that the Census had an allegedly ‘scientific’ role to play. By contrast, the 1941 Census Commissioner had a different complaint: There exists, I think, a widespread impression that the main object of the Indian census is anthropological. This was illustrated by a letter from a certain Association which suggested that census comments on anthropology were amateur, should be replaced by the work of trained anthropologists and therefore would I put up the funds accordingly. This approach illustrated in marked fashion the confusion of issues. The first two points are acceptable but the third doesn’t follow at all. The conclusion from the first two is that the census should be freed from the conduct and the cost of operations which it does not control and indeed it would have been to the advantage of anthropological studies in India if this logical separation had been realised sooner. Anthropological interests are among the most highly personal that can be imagined and where this personal predilection does not exist it is foolish to attempt to create it. While in any case even predilection is no good without experience. One unfortunate result of this excessive association of the census with anthropology was to obscure the basic importance of the country-wide determinations which so far the census was the only means of securing; and the tendency to dismiss it as something concerned with the peculiar activities of castes and tribes had, I think, some part in encouraging the incuria regarding the actual machinery whereby a unique operation was carried out. It must also have affected adversely the proper consideration and financing of anthropological work in India. Such work should be carried on year in year out and not forced into the constricted periods of a 10-yearly convulsion.120

The two moments in census-taking are instructive in more ways than the changed views of its anthropological ambitions make out: in 1941, colonial authorities are far more acutely conscious that it is the census itself that can legitimise identity claims. In 1941, accordingly, problems of ‘communal’ considerations in census reporting were identified as very acute. Head count falsification in terms of numbers living in a house was affected by this, with a

119 Census of India, 1901, volume I: India – Part I – Report, p 2. 120 MWM Yeatts, CIE, ICS, Census Commissioner for India, Census of India 1941 vol. 1 -India, Part I, Tables (Delhi: Government of India, 1943), p 2.

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strong tendency towards overdeclaration. Some of the census figures were consequently deemed ‘worthless’, notably with reference to Urdu and Hindi speakers, where lies were notoriously difficult to detect. The Census Commissioner’s advice for future operations was to stop collecting this information regarding language altogether.121 He further added that questions on ‘Mother tongue, script of literacy’ could also be ‘dropped altogether’.122 The 1931 census coincided with a civil disobedience movement which occasioned a good deal of localised trouble to certain superintendents particularly however in Bombay. 1940–41 saw also political influences on the census but in the opposite direction; since whereas the difficulty in 1931 had been to defeat a boycott the difficulty in 1941 was to defeat an excess of zeal. It can be taken as certain that this single instance operated heavily to secure perhaps the fullest record yet achieved in an Indian census. The whole population was census conscious or at any rate the active part of it. To this extent the public interest was a definite gain and part of the heavy Bombay and Bengal increases is undoubtedly due to under-enumeration in 1931 being overtaken now. The interest however was not all beneficial and in some areas the communal excitement passed all bounds. . ..123

This records, from the reverse angle, a by-now well-recorded phenomenon. Incorporation of lower castes, as of members of a ‘community’, was played out as a numbers game: for ‘Hindus’, the Arya Samaj and Shuddhi (the ‘purification’ by ‘reconversion’ of Muslims who had allegedly once been Hindus), the Hindu Mahasabha and lower caste inclusion, Gandhi and untouchables, played the function of making ‘Hindus’ a majority. This downward propagation of ‘Hinduism’ was, it is said, met in the other direction by processes of ‘Sanskritisation’. Censuswise, a person became one with the identity that he named when recognised as such in writing. The use made of the numbers thereafter was outside of his control. This is a set of questions raised earlier on. The Gandhian manoeuvre of the ‘fast unto death’ and the Poona Pact with Ambedkar led to the answer to the question of how to count someone as a ‘Hindu’. This counting was now more important than self-definitions or solidarities. It is instructive to look briefly at exactly what happened between the Communal Award and the Poona Pact. Clause 7 of the Communal Award read: ‘All qualified electors who are not voters either in a Mahomedan, Sikh, Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian, or European constituency will be entitled to vote in a

121 Census of India 1941 vol. 1 -India, Part I, Tables, p 9. 122 Census of India 1941 vol. 1 -India, Part I, Tables, p 22. 123 Census of India 1941 vol. 1 -India, Part I, Tables, p 9.

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general constituency.’ Clause 8 read: ‘Seven seats will be reserved for Mahrattas in certain selected plural number general constituencies in Bombay.’ And clause 9: Members of the ‘depressed classes’ qualified to vote will vote in a general constituency. In view of the fact that for a considerable period these classes would be unlikely by this means alone to secure any adequate representation in the Legislature, a number of special seats will be assigned to them. These seats will be filled by election from special constituencies in which only members of ‘the depressed classes’ electorally qualified will be entitled to vote. Any person voting in such a special constituency will, as stated above, be also entitled to vote in a general constituency. It is intended that these constituencies should be formed in selected areas where the depressed classes are most numerous and that, except in Madras, they should not cover the whole area of a province. In Bengal, it seems the majority of votes will belong to the depressed classes. Accordingly, pending further investigation, no number has been fixed for the members to be returned from the special depressed class constituencies in that province. It is intended to secure that the depressed classes should obtain not less than 10 seats in the Bengal Legislature [. . .] His Majesty’s Government do not consider that these special ‘depressed classes’ constituencies will be required for more than a limited time. They intend that the constitution shall provide that they shall come to an end after 20 years, if they have not previously been abolished under the general powers of electoral revision referred to in Para. 6.

The relevant passage of Para. 6 reads: Provisions will be made in the constitution itself to empower the revision of this electoral arrangement [i.e. communal electorates and electoral areas excluded from the communal electorates as ‘backward’] . . . after 10 years, with the assent of the communities affected, for the ascertainment of which suitable means will be devised.124

The Poona Pact, September 1932 had the following adjustments to clause 9 of the Communal Award: ‘There shall be seats reserved for the Depressed Classes out of the General electorate seats in the Provincial Legislatures as follows [. . .] Elections to these seats shall be by joint electorates’, subject to certain procedures.125 If the question that Gandhi insisted upon was whether the Depressed Classes were ‘Hindus’ or not, it might be noted that the legal rubric at issue was ‘general’: the word ‘Hindu’ does not appear. We might complicate this further and do the arithmetic in another way: since the franchise was itself a property franchise, how many ‘backward caste’ voters were there anyway? The ambiguity is of course not restricted to the question of numbers of voters: it is also a matter of 124 Quotes taken from Christine Dobbin (ed), Basic Documents in the Development of Modern India and Pakistan 1835–1947 (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970), p 117. 125 Dobbin (ed), Basic Documents in the Development of Modern India and Pakistan 1835–1947, p 118.

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majorities and minorities, and if in 1932 this was not quite clear, the consequences for 1947 were far clearer: ‘Hindus’ were a structural majority according to the settlement of 1932.

Some Conclusions: Fascisms, Nationalisms It is certainly unusual not to address the Hindutva brigade in a chapter on political Hinduism or on the politics of Hinduism. And the failure of this chapter to address them directly is not because they are not important.126 In part this is because the story is relatively well-known. Savarkar, Golwalkar, and company, and the conflation of Hindutva with race and nation rather than with religion, is an argument that has been made before. The positive engagement with fascism and völkisch models, the borrowing from fascist and Nazi ideals, the explicit exclusion of Muslims, the support for genocidal solutions, have all been listed. But that is the logical end to a story that isn’t quite so logical, and the purpose of this chapter is to nudge us gently in the direction of also looking beyond the obvious. The question of engagements with fascism in India must be told (and with more subtlety than it has been so far).127 But the trouble with the fascist side of the story is that it is too neat, and not quite as strange as is made out. Nationalisms tend towards fascism; that is well known and belongs to the central definitions of fascism that we have.128 Nationalisms have exclusionary tendencies well before they become or need to be murderous. And the engagements with ‘Hindu’ as a set of categories described above had wider resonances that perhaps contributed to fascist or quasi-fascist trends. But just as an intellectual history of fascism ‘proper’ needs to take account of ideas that were a part of fascism as well as of non-fascist social and intellectual formations,129 a history of the social and intellectual uses of ‘Hinduism’ must resist the temptation to use the story of Hinduism-as-fascism as the central illustration by taking account of its non-fascist uses.

126 See Chapter 6; see also Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a non-Eurocentric understanding of fascism’, Transcultural Studies (December 2014), pp. 63–100. 127 See for example Marzia Casolari, The Italian Connection: Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence (New Delhi: Footnotes, 2000), which largely bases itself on showing the association of individuals from the Hindutva brigade with Italian Fascists. 128 See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991). 129 See Kevin Passmore, ‘The Ideological Origins of Fascism Before 1914’, in RJB Bosworth (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11–31.

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Another absence, despite the Poona Pact teleology, is that of Gandhi and Gandhians. They are at least not so explicitly present. Was Gandhi’s version a successful version of ‘Hinduism’? In some influential readings, this version seems to have competed directly with the Hindutva version of Hinduism130: tolerance and non-violence versus intolerance and violence; the assimilative potential of Hindu spirituality and the similarities or unity of this spirituality with aspects of a Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or universal morality, as against the idea of a sacred soil and race. One could, however, argue that these are equally stereotypical, and that both contribute to the use of ‘Hindu’ as a political category and as a national category in colonial and post-independence India – in different ways, but also sometimes in complementary ways. Thus, the category ‘Hindu’ operates as a ‘national’ category in conjunction with ideas of ‘race’ as well as nation. It leans heavily on readings of ‘Hindu’ that come from outside the Indian subcontinent. This is true of the ‘Hindutva’ readings, of course – the fascist and Nazi connections – but also of the ‘Aryan’ (Orientalists, Theosophists, comparative jurists). There were several very productive confusions behind this invention. Is this too ‘discursive’ a reading? I don’t think so. Practices coexist with claims made discursively for a cause, and if an argument persuades practitioners that they should sign up to the claim, then and only then are the practitioners also ideologues or demonstrants for the cause. Otherwise the two inhabit parallel worlds that happily coexist in mutual ignorance, mutual tension or mutual tolerance. The shadow between the motion and the act, between the idea and the reality, may be noted, but without anxiety. National claims are made on the basis of ‘what ought to be’ in the eyes of self-proclaimed leaders; a long-standing anti-‘communal’ polemic that has relied on what people do as opposed to what ideologues say misses the point: Practices are messier than ideological statements. This doesn’t mean that the practice disproves or delegitimates the ideological statements. Not necessarily; in fact the ideological statements might be comforting because they create a spurious neatness to one’s perceptions of practices that in practice are ambiguous. A category was found to meet a need: that of the ‘authenticity’ of the entity that had to be imagined as a ‘nation’. ‘Hindu’ was in many senses a flexible category; as a term, it had normative resonances, and as a concept, it was unable to describe an external reality with any precision. But it did not have to.

130 There has been a strong attempt by interested parties to try to reclaim Gandhi from the Hindutva brigade. See David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Times and Ours: the Global Legacy of His Ideas (London: Hurst, 2003).

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Were there less exclusionary alternatives to the ‘Hindu’ to invoke the ‘nation’? The ‘Nehruvian’ version has always claimed to be one, or has long had that claim made on its behalf. The next chapter will turn to the question of the Nehruvian and its relationship to nationalism.

Chapter 5 The Nehruvian and the Developmental As nationalisms go, Indian nationalism as articulated by Jawaharlal Nehru and circles close to him is apparently as appealing as it can get: tolerant, secular, inclusive, egalitarian and non-discriminatory. ‘Nehruvian’ nationalism ought to be – if a nationalism could be personified in the way that its ideologues often personify nations – the hero of a book on anticolonial nationalisms. It is, if one is looking for the infinite possibilities of an inclusive version of civic belonging, truly a thing of beauty. The personalisation of this model is attested to by the shorthand term ‘Nehruvian’. When we work with that term for the post-independence Indian state, we conflate several questions. To what extent was Jawaharlal Nehru in control of, or even representative of, the period to which he lent his name? How far were the politics and principles of the period merely a language of legitimacy that had to be adhered to publicly, thereby also providing cover for various forms of non-‘Nehruvian’ politics? These separations, when made, provide a number of strands through which to read the official ideologies of the ‘Nehruvian’ state. The personal views of Nehru, in a structural argument, should be of lesser importance, but for the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru was, for a variety of reasons, able disproportionately to influence the boundaries of what was legitimate and what was not in the independent Indian state. As the son of an influential Congressman, as a close follower and then the anointed successor of Gandhi, therefore also as the ideal intermediary among divergent tendencies within the Indian National Congress, as the (albeit muted) voice of the left at the centre of the Congress, and as the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated politician with whom British politicians found it easier to negotiate, Nehru was in a pivotal position to make decisions that he found possible to turn into the official rhetoric of the Indian state. A close reading of Nehru’s pronouncements on the subject of nationalism, and of his politics in a number of contexts, shows that Nehru was not primarily a nationalist. Moreover, if nationalism is a tradition of thought that must have a basis for distinguishing one ‘nation’ from another, such a non-exclusionary nationalism as was articulated by Nehru and by those close to him is in fact no longer classifiable as nationalism. Although Nehru was forced to tailor his politics and his articulated ideas to an obligatory language of legitimation that relied on nationalism in a political context in which it was inescapable, he sought, nonetheless, not to be a nationalist, even as leader of a nationalist movement. He attempted to resist being pushed towards political positions based largely on national chauvinism, towards https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-006

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what he believed to be the excesses of a politics based largely on nationalism. To a large extent, he failed; and this is illustrative of the necessary failure of any form of nationalism to be inclusive. Although the ‘Nehruvian model’ of Indian nationalism became the officially proclaimed version, it is doubtful that it was ever properly hegemonic. And the question of why it was not hegemonic, and yet remained the version that was most useful to which to publicly proclaim allegiance, once again raises other questions about the importance of languages of legitimation in a political order: what does this enable? What does it rule out? Which manoeuvres, ideological and political, does it necessitate or obviate? There is of course the related question of state-led developmentalism, which in the case of the ‘Nehruvians’ becomes in many ways an ersatz nationalism. Derived in large measure from Comintern policy and communist theorising and thereafter diluted both in theory and practice, this form of developmentalism was defended through a stageist argument, in which an early compromise with anticolonial nationalism of a bourgeois variety leads to national independence and a progressive nation-state in the hands of an enlightened and socialistleaning leadership, thereby paving the way for socialism. The resulting (enlightened and socialist-leaning) regime is then expected, in good part through the leftward pull exerted by the left, to pave the way for socialism.1 Notwithstanding the latter stages never having been reached, the initial position, once considered a compromise, is now firmly defended in some circles as great wisdom: a ‘national’ path to socialism, in the manner of the dependency theorists’ views on autonomous versus dependent development, was allegedly anticipated by (in our case Indian) communists, and even the ‘national bourgeoisie’.2

1 This is indeed a plausible reading of Lenin’s views on national bourgeoisies, suitably modified by MN Roy’s intervention. See VI Lenin, Draft Theses on National and the Colonial Questions (1920), online at http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm, accessed 28.01.2020, part of the 11th thesis of which reads ‘The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form’. It is of course stretching a point beyond credibility to suggest that the ‘temporary alliance’ must more or less be institutionalised in the new state and continue to be defended; and is a decontextualised reading of Lenin’s views on the importance of nations and the right to self-determination. 2 See the argument in Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, (New Delhi: People’s Publishing house, 1966) and several decades later, but substantially presenting the same position, Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, 1920–1947, (New Delhi: Sage, 2002). Contemporary socialists and communists, however, did not make the argument about a progressive national bourgeoisie,

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As some writers have, however, pointed out, when demystified or denuded of the legitimating term ‘socialism’, such a ‘third world socialism’ as India’s can be better understood as a capitalist economy in which domestic industry was sheltered from foreign competition. This was central to the strategy of ‘importsubstituting industrialisation’; investment on infrastructure and early risk-taking on new necessary industries was by the state and by state-owned enterprises; there was some – often rhetorical – commitment to socialism or at least social justice or social welfare; some – often rhetorical – commitment to land reform. The details can be filled in. State-led developmentalism has been considered preferable to a dangerous, potentially or actually exclusionary ‘cultural nationalism’, where ‘culture’ stands for sectional interests, usually of a majoritarian nature. A developmental ‘nationalism’ is allegedly more progressive than a ‘cultural’ one, because it is a version of inclusive civic belonging rather than of ethnic belonging and its concomitant exclusions.3 The (nation-)state is legitimised and naturalised by the state claiming to be the nation through a project of collective ‘development’, in which the ‘people’ are allegedly the ultimate beneficiaries, and whose role it is to support the state’s leadership.4 Meanwhile, a commitment to the nationstate is underpinned by the fact that ‘development’ takes place within the claimed geographical boundaries of that state. This collective movement towards a common goal allegedly obviates the need for close definitions of belonging and non-belonging to the ‘nation’: definitions can be by-passed, therefore ‘culture’, ‘ethnies’, or various other more exclusionary ways of imagining the nation, remain less of an issue.5

arguing instead that the alliance was a temporary one which nevertheless had many problems. These debates can be followed in the pages of the Congress Socialist from 1934 to 1938, which from 1935 was also the journal of the Popular Front in India. 3 The argument here is related to that of Tom Nairn, linking political economy to nationalism. See Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977); Tom Nairn, ‘The Modern Janus’, New Left Review I/94, November-December 1975, pp. 3–39. 4 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 202–05. 5 One may cite the constructionist versus primordialist debate here: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (ed), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), introduction, versus A. D. Smith and his followers: see A. D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambidge: Polity Press, 1995), for a statement of this position, and for a restatement, A. D. Smith, ‘History and national destiny: responses and clarifications’, Nations and Nationalism 10, 1–2 (2004), pp. 195–209. This strikes me as largely a non-debate: if ethnies are the basis of ‘nations’, who invents ‘ethnies’? (See Chapter One on this debate).

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Does developmentalism qualify as a form of nationalism? Does it do the work of delineating those who belong to the ‘nation’ from those who do not? And does it replace, is it replaced by, or does it coexist with, a more ‘cultural’ form of nationalism? Is it useful to draw such a distinction even if only to make a case for lesser and greater evils? The relationship between nationalism in India and the developmental imagination is central, then, to understanding the operation and the discontents of the ‘Nehruvian’ project. The argument presented here is that the ‘developmental’ in the Indian case was the outcome of a regime that sought to bypass the national question, while inevitably having to situate itself within a language of legitimacy that depended on nationalism, which was the only available paradigm to internationally (by which is of course meant ‘inter-state’) legitimate the Indian state. Then there is the problem of territoriality: the ‘Nehruvian’ state in India, like many states formed after a formal decolonisation process, inherited borders and boundaries that were set in place by a colonial power. To justify the ‘naturalness’ of that territory in terms of a ‘nation’ defined in ‘cultural’ terms becomes extremely difficult without making major exclusions; and yet there were many who made that attempt. Equally, in ‘developmental’ terms the alternative is to take the postindependence state’s boundaries as given and not to talk too much about them. Inasmuch as the state had to legitimise its borders, the ‘national’ was a problem that could be deferred, but not suppressed. The ‘developmental’, thus, did not precede, replace or impede a project of ‘cultural nationalism’ (‘culture’ here often being a euphemism for ‘Hindu’ or ‘majoritarian’), nor was it altogether separate from it. As an alternative to a ‘cultural nationalism’, to the extent that it was one, it was never altogether hegemonic, as admitted by its own protagonists.6 Developmentalism was also a way for an elite which saw itself as progressive to keep its hold on the state. Certain general questions emerge from this situation: is a ‘civic’ nationalism a nationalism without characteristics specific to the ‘nation’? Can it distinguish between the characteristics of its own nationals and those of other states? If it is unable to or refuses to do so, does it remain a nationalism? In practice, a ‘Nehruvian’ nationalism is open to the charge (often levelled at it) that it has no specific characteristics, or that it was too ‘foreign’ and not ‘rooted’ enough in the country whose nationalism it sought to be. This is on the one hand what makes it attractive to other states emerging from colonial rule with

6 See for instance Z. A. Ahmad’s notes from his talk with Jawaharlal Nehru, June 1945, ‘not to be shown to anyone else without P. C. Joshi’s [General Secretary, Communist Party of India] permission’, CPI documents, 1945/9, P. C. Joshi Archive, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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messy identitarian politics and heterogenous populations. On the other hand, this is what makes it vulnerable to those who seek a ‘proper’ nationalism with positive (‘cultural’?) characteristics that go back to ‘time immemorial’ or an ancient, ‘classical’ past. So the ‘Nehruvian’ (‘civic’) nationalism is forced to confront its non-specificity: it could just as easily be an Indian, an Indonesian or a Ghanaian nationalism. Since the ‘Nehruvians’ cannot easily admit this without abandoning the legitimating framework of the nation-state, they must draw upon some specific characteristics. This leads to a calling upon the specific, which must be at least somewhat cultural. If we are speaking here of inclusive civic belonging, everyone within the borders belongs to the state, regardless of caste, creed or religion. Exclusions are not civic but economic; whether this is preferable is debatable, but for the purposes of our question, a Nehruvian developmentalism appears to meet the criteria of a ‘civil philosophy’. It also meets the criterion of ‘educating’ people in ‘civility’ or ‘civic virtue’: there was a constant pedagogic project built into the Nehruvian developmental regime. This model has problematic implications for formal democracy. The ‘masses’ would be told what to do for the good of the (nation-)state, which was also (in the long run?) for their own good. If, as Nehru admitted privately, it was Hindu sectarian opinion that was in the ascendant in the period leading to and immediately after independence,7 he would ensure that this tendency had no access to legitimate political arenas. The ‘Nehruvians’, and Nehru in particular, were adept at manoeuvring languages of legitimacy so that, in the context both of the Indian anti-colonial struggle led by the Indian National Congress that had always claimed to be non-sectarian, and of the post-independence period, where ethnocentric sectarianisms stood temporarily discredited in the public domain (not least after the assassination of Gandhi by a Hindu),8 a Hindu chauvinist nationalism had limited access to the language of public legitimation. Thus, the ‘cultural’ in the ‘national’ was sought to be suppressed by a form of state-led developmentalism that claimed some basis in internationalist, or at least less than nationalist, thought. But this was always very unstable.

7 Jawaharlal Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 7 August 1947, in S Gopal (ed), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984-) [SWJN II] vol. 2, p 191; ZA Ahmad’s notes from his talk with Nehru, June 1945, CPI documents, 1945/9, PC Joshi Archive. 8 SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 35–36, ‘The light has gone out of our lives’, All-India Radio broadcast by Nehru, 30 January 1948; resolutions on Gandhi’s death, 2 February 1948, SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 37–38.

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1 ‘Nehruvian’ Nationalism and the Developmental Imagination It may, as mentioned before, be considered arbitrary to attribute the ‘Nehruvian’ solely to Nehru and his close coterie; and as I have argued at length elsewhere, what settles down as the ‘Nehruvian’ consensus is also composed of elements from other sources.9 The ‘Nehruvian’ was thus a compromise which was fronted by Nehru, and which was in large measure a matter of successfully controlling languages of political legitimation so that sectarian forms of nationalism had limited access to the language of public legitimation. It is, if anything, these languages, and the corresponding politics they legitimated or delegitimated, that made up the ‘Nehruvian’. ‘Development’ as a set of concerns was certainly not merely a set of ideas held by ‘Nehruvians’ or the left. At about the time of the transfer of power, the conventions of speaking about development incorporated a number of coexisting and sometimes contradictory elements. Claims to ‘socialism’ – or to some social concern for the poor and downtrodden – were obligatory, since a movement towards social justice was in public debates depicted as necessary for a poor country whose independence was supposed to provide solace to its poor. Such claims were by the 1940s made by capitalists and avowed socialists alike. Also invoked were ‘science’, technology and technical expertise as ways of achieving ‘modern’ social and economic goals – even by the Gandhians, who tried to redefine the ‘modern’ in such a way as to justify a decentralised, village-based and labourintensive socio-economic order as more in keeping with ‘modern’ trends.10 To achieve these goals, a good deal of ‘national discipline’ was required, and the ‘masses’ would have to make some sacrifices in the short-term, or in the ‘transitional period’. A more explicitly conservative aspect was also present: solutions to social, economic or political problems were to conform to ‘indigenous’ values – borrowings from ‘foreign’ systems were to be treated with suspicion. This was a particularly useful tactical argument used against socialists and communists by Gandhians and by the right (often strategically merging with the Gandhians); but it was also used by other socialists to argue that communists were ‘foreign’ elements controlled from Moscow. The appeal of the ‘indigenist’ strand of argument in a colonised or newly independent country was rhetorically powerful, and

9 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10 Zachariah, Developing India, Chapter Five; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘In Search of the “Indigenous”: JC Kumarappa and the Philosophy of the Village Movement’, in Michael Mann and Harald Fischer-Tine (ed), Colonialism as Civilising Mission, (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 248–269.

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could often put people who counted themselves in the ‘progressive’ camp on the defensive. These views contributed to a general and conventionalised view of ‘development’ as ‘progress’, and of India as a potentially ‘modern’ country with a rich ‘tradition’.11 As regards the ‘cultural’, all forms of argument that claimed ‘India’ as a national unit relied on some form of invocation of an ancient past that was, by default at least, ‘Hindu’. As the previous chapter has argued, ‘Hindu’ and its related expressions were never fully ‘national’, because their multiple meanings could not simply be reduced to the imagining of an Indian nation, or a future Indian state. However, the ‘national’ in the Indian case was extremely reliant on one or another version of the ‘Hindu’.12 Many nationalisms rely on the ancientpast-revived-in-the-present theme; and whether as a geographical, cultural or religious entity, the ‘Hindu’ past was required for the present. ‘Tradition’ and ‘indigeneity’ tended also to be euphemisms that easily gravitated towards uppercaste ‘Hindu’ practices; and whether or not it could be proved that these were recently invented traditions, they were effective in creating solidarities around themselves. Debating the national therefore, always, if often implicitly, relied on some debate around the category ‘Hindu’. But a merely ‘Hindu’ identity was not desirable as the basis for a national identity to serve a new state. It had long been the contention of Nehru and the Congress Left that ‘communal’ identities were not true identities; they were made possible by the poverty of the people and their consequent search for resources of rather irrational hope, and were manipulated by elites with a vested interest in sectarianism for their own narrow ends. The preferred way of overcoming this problem of false identities and consciousness was by economic means: greater prosperity for the masses would lead to greater awareness that the real issues were economic. This, with some justification, can be seen as developmentalism in place of sectarianism or ‘communalism’, or indeed developmentalism in place of nationalism, for sectarianism or ‘communalism’ can be seen as a nationalism that sets its boundaries in the wrong place. It depends of course on one’s point of view what that wrong place is. It is important, therefore, to look at Nehruvian nationalism in this context: an attempt to rely on solidarities based on elective affinity, not ethnicity, religion or other forms of sectarianism. As Nehru was repeatedly to put it in public, nationalism alone was too narrow and parochial to solve any major problems.

11 Zachariah, Developing India. 12 See inter alia Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) for a strong version of this argument.

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Figure 8.1: The international face of the Indian nationalist struggle: food for Spain, 1938. From the back cover of Jawaharlal Nehru’s pamphlet, Spain! Why?

Thus, it was important to have an economic programme for the raising of living standards and incomes.13 But it was inevitable that a people not yet free would think in terms of nationalism. (This can be seen as a form of ventriloquism of elite thinking: Nehru attributed an outdated nationalism to the ‘people’, as a sort of automatic reflex.) When they were free they would think in more broad terms, Nehru argued, because nationalism was a nineteenth century idea whose time

13 See Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 266, 587–590.

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had come and gone.14 (He was to be less optimistic about this later in his life, as the everyday politics of independent India took aggressively nationalist forms at various points.)15 As the 1930s wore on, and the connections between extreme forms of nationalism and fascism became more and more apparent to those whose politics had been formed within leftist circles, Nehru’s pronouncements on the subject became more and more outspoken: in an article written for the American periodical Asia in 1938, he wrote: Nationalism is in ill odour today in the West and has become the parent of aggressiveness, intolerance and brutal violence. All that is reactionary seeks shelter under that name – fascism, imperialism, race bigotry, and the crushing of that free spirit of enquiry which gave the semblance of greatness to Europe in the nineteenth century. Culture succumbs before its onslaught and civilisation decays, Democracy and freedom are its pet aversions, and in its name innocent men and women and children in Spain are bombed to death, and fierce race persecution takes place. Yet it was nationalism that built up the nations of Europe a hundred years or more ago and provided the background for that civilisation whose end seems to be drawing near. And it is nationalism which is the driving force today in the countries of the East which suffer under foreign domination and seek freedom. To them it brings unity and vitality and a lifting of the burdens of the spirit which subjection entails. There is virtue in it up to a certain stage – till then it is a progressive force adding to human freedom. But even then it is a narrowing creed and a nation seeking freedom, like a person who is sick, can think of little besides its own struggle and its own misery. India has been no exception to this rule and often, in the intensity of her struggle, she has forgotten the world and thought only in terms of herself. But as strength came to her and confidence born of success, she began to look beyond her frontiers . . . .16

At a reception in London organised by the India League in the summer of 1938, Nehru commented that there was bound to be bitterness and hatred in a strong nationalist movement like India’s; that it was, then, singularly free from bitterness was, he said, largely due to the influence and example of Gandhi. (It is worth noting the regularity with which Indian political leaders pointed out how little racial bitterness against Europeans or British there was in the Indian national struggle. That they did perhaps protest too much should be reasonably clear.) Indians, Nehru said,

14 E.g. Message to the All-India Congress Socialist Conference at Meerut, 13 January 1936, in S Gopal (ed), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Fund, 1975-) [SWJN] vol. 7, pp. 60–61. 15 See for instance his letter to Bertrand Russell during the China crisis, cited in Bertrand Russell, Unarmed Victory, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 105. 16 Typewritten copy of manuscript of Nehru’s article for Asia, in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) file, IOR: L/P&J/12/294, f. 9.

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were willing to try to forget and to accept in the spirit of larger comradeship help in their National struggle. Nationalism was in many ways a good thing, but in another way it tended to stunt and narrow the race. He was convinced that India would succeed in the light of what she had already accomplished: her case was better than that of Europe where nationalism had gone mad: he dwelt on Fascist excesses which now shocked people in Europe but which did not shock or surprise people in India – they were used to excesses.17

Socialism, on the other hand, was the ideology of the future, because it sought to make real and significant changes in people’s lives. This was not merely Nehru’s personal fantasy; he was himself the focal point of a group of political activists within the Congress, who shared many of his assumptions and beliefs, and who were dissatisfied by Gandhi’s leadership, the latter’s propensity for unilateralism and compromise, and his tendency to see businessmen as holding their wealth as ‘trustees’ for the ‘nation’. In what was the first manifesto of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), Jayaprakash Narayan based the strategy of the new group within the Congress on ‘what Pandit Jawaharlal should do’.18 Although the Congress Socialists believed Nehru to be one of them, he never formally joined the group, preferring to keep a strategic distance, as being associated with a faction seemed incompatible with his standing in the ranks of the central leadership of the Congress. He seldom made this position explicit, even in the face of accusations by CSP members like Jayaprakash Narayan that Nehru was ‘non-cooperating’ with them.19 Occasional glimpses of some of his reasoning can be discerned: in July 1938, at a small meeting in London with some 25 Indian students at Caxton Hall, Nehru criticised the Congress Socialist Party, whose aims, he said, were vague and whose leaders, specially M.R. MASANI, were politically unreliable. As regards the Communists, he admired their programme and viewpoint, but remarked that as they were an illegal body, it was very difficult for them to develop effectively. Asked why he did not himself lead the Congress Socialist Party or the Communist Party, he replied that he could do much better in Congress itself. For example, it was through his influence that certain resolutions proposed by these organisations had been introduced at the recent Session of the All India Congress: in fact he felt that his role should be that of peacemaker. If he had tried to force Socialist doctrines down the throats of the A.I.C.C., he would have met with serious opposition from the Right Wing leaders. It

17 Report on India League reception to Nehru, Kingsway Hall, 27.6.38, IPI file, IOR: L/P&J/12/ 293, ff. 83–87. 18 Jayaprakash Narayan, Why Socialism?, Benares, 1934, excerpt in Congress Socialist, 24 (February 1935), pp. 5–6. 19 Jayaprakash Narayan to Jawaharlal Nehru, Calicut, November 23, 1938, JNP, NML, vol. 54, p 58.

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was his intention to continue in his present role and to make it his business to educate the Right Wing.20

Despite his own reservations about standing forth as a socialist in the organisational sense, Nehru always declared his socialist convictions, and socialist support went a long way towards creating the so-called ‘Nehruvian consensus’; it was in fact never a consensus across the Congress, and this was always acknowledged in internal discussions.21 Even as the left wing of a nationalist movement put forward socialism as the true solution, nationalism was implicitly – in most people’s thinking – better than ‘communalism’ because it achieved the unity of all (‘Indian’) people against the British. This simply meant that a nationalism that was not broadly enough defined could be construed as communalism. Development was potentially the solvent of sectarian identities. The basis of development was, in earlier versions of this argument, to be socialism. In the post-independence Indian state, this basis changed implicitly to a state-led development where the state led by the Nehruvian elite would stand for the nation, and use the rhetoric of collective belonging to the nation to direct developmental plans from above on behalf of the people.22 This is a version of developmentalism that is a surrogate for nationalism, and can express itself in a language of nationalism. Nehru’s first relatively systematic statement on the nature of Indian nationalism appears quite late: in 1946. It was a time when Nehru, by his own admission, was not properly in touch with events in India and the world.23 In The Discovery of India, Nehru stated, as he had done before, that an obsession with nationalism was a natural response to the lack of freedom: ‘for every subject country national freedom must be the first and dominant urge’.24 With the achievement of freedom the obsession would vanish; wider groupings of nations and states, and wider solidarities on the basis of internationalism would be possible. But the emotional pull of nationalism could not be wished away.

20 Nehru at a meeting of some 25 Indian students at Caxton Hall, London, 15th July 1938, report in IPI file, L/P&J/12/293, f. 118. 21 This can be followed in Congress Socialist reports from 1934 to 1938, when it folded. 22 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 200–219; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘India: The Road to the First Five-Year Plan’, in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed), Decolonization and the Politics of Transition in South Asia (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2016), pp. 199–227. 23 Jawaharlal Nehru, article for Daily Herald, London, typescript dated 9/12/41, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Library [NML], Part III Sl. No. 85. 24 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, (London: Signet, 1946), p 52.

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How could one find a common cultural and historical heritage for India that would serve to build a sense of the nation? (It is once again, the ventriloquism of elite thinking that attributes this need for an emotive nationalism not to themselves – as the glue to hold together a ruling class – but to the ‘masses’.) Nehru’s version of understanding the history of India was to be: a process similar to that of psychoanalysis, but applied to a race or to humanity itself instead of to an individual. The burden of the past, the burden of both good and ill, is overpowering, and sometimes suffocating, more especially for those of us who belong to very ancient civilisations like those of India and China.25

The comparison with China, as an allegedly ancient civilisation that, like India, was in danger of romanticising the ancient past, was a motif that continuously reappears in Nehru’s writing from this period. The anxieties generated by the past in relation to the present had to be confronted and resolved. As a matter of central importance, Nehru confronted the ‘Hindu’ view of Indian-ness: ‘It is . . . incorrect and undesirable to use “Hindu” or “Hinduism” for Indian culture, even with reference to the distant past’.26 The term ‘Hindu’ was used in a geographical sense to denote the Indian land mass by outsiders, derived from the river Sindhu or Indus. The ‘Hindu golden age’ idea had been crucially shaped by the needs of Indian nationalism. This, he believed, was understandable. ‘It is not Indians only who are affected by nationalist urges and supposed national interest in the writing or consideration of history. Every nation and people seems to be affected by this desire to gild and better the past and distort it to their advantage’.27 But it was a version that was, he argued, historically false (even as he was himself attempting something not dissimilar; to narrate an acceptable past for the ‘nation’, retrospectively to justify his own commitment to that ‘nation’). Although he acknowledged that some basic ideas and continuities had been preserved in popular and elite cultures, it was impossible to attribute this to one group of inhabitants of India. Historically, India was ‘like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously’.28 Each layer had enriched Indian culture, and had a place in a new national consciousness; the great rulers of India were the synthesisers who looked beyond sectional interests to bring together different layers. The alien nature of British rule centred 25 26 27 28

Nehru, Discovery of India, p 36. Nehru, Discovery of India, p 75. Nehru, Discovery of India, p 104. Nehru, Discovery of India, p 59.

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on the British refusal to accept India geographically as a home, and its exploitation of India economically for the benefit of outside interests. Ancient palimpsest: this, then, was to be the acknowledged basis of a nationalism that thereafter would seek to establish the grounds for a civic rather than a confessional state: a shared and somewhat mystic common culture that would be acknowledged and then for all effective purposes forgotten. Thus, there were no fundamental cultural values that defined the entity ‘India’; and this itself was its fundamental value. Nehru also warned against a view of India that over-glorified the past – a danger, he noted, that was also present in China. He agreed that both civilisations had ‘shown an extraordinary staying power and adaptability’.29 But not all ancient things were worth preserving: caste discrimination, for instance, had to be struggled against. India was at present ‘an odd mixture of medievalism, appalling poverty and misery and a somewhat superficial modernism of the middle classes’.30 What was needed was to bring the modern to the masses, by the middle classes understanding and promoting the needs of the masses. He stressed his admiration for Russia and the Chinese communists in their attempts to end similar conditions. ‘Culture’, of course, remained the sticky question if the purpose was to invent an inclusive nationalism. Nehru’s solutions to the problem of Indian cultural unity were rather awkward. He himself claimed to have experienced this unity emotionally rather than intellectually, in his travels through India. On the intellectual side, however, he tended to fall back on stereotypes. Nehru’s own language, then and later, tended to be imbued with some of the prevalent language of race and eugenics, as well as a patronising and at times paternalistic attitude towards the ‘masses’: he spoke unselfconsciously of ‘sturdy peasants’ and ‘finer physical types’.31 His view of Indian culture as accretion and synthesis fitted in well with some cultural practices such as the worship at Sufi shrines of both ‘Hindus’ and Muslims. In other cases, this view did not work quite so well. According to Nehru, Indian peasants had a common oral tradition in versions of the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.32 This might have been true for some Muslim or Christian ‘sturdy peasants’, but was not true, for instance, of the north-eastern ‘tribal’ territories of India that were to be inherited by independent India because they had been within the borders of British India.

29 Nehru, Discovery of India, p 144. 30 Nehru, Discovery of India, p 56. 31 Nehru, Discovery of India, pp. 65, 68. 32 Nehru, Discovery of India, p 67.

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There is a strong sense here that the need for such a statement appeared in the context of the growing strength of the Pakistan movement during the Second World War; and as a result, the statement of Indian nationalism as can be discovered in The Discovery of India was in large measure obsolete by the time it was published. Nehru regarded his statement as an attempt to find a consensual description of what it meant to be an Indian, rather than merely as a statement of his own positions: he had hitherto avoided making too many or too precise statements on Indian nationalism. The text attributes much of what he wrote to his conversations with fellow inmates in prison on the nature of the national; and it gives the sense of his having attempted a progressive synthesis of these statements.33 He continuously distinguishes his personal views from those that he believes might have wider resonances. Moreover, he does not and cannot work his way around the problem of the slippage between, or identification of, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’. Instead, however, he tries to dilute the significance of the category ‘Hindu’, disarming it of its communitarian and therefore sectarian implications. This is of course an impossible task.34

2 The Communist Counter-Manoeuvre Such public statements were in fact instances of ‘progressive’ political activists chasing and attempting to reorder and reconfigure forms of public opinion that they found disturbing, with less and less optimism that this was possible. The difficulty of finding an inclusive ‘culture’ that would encompass class, regional and religious differences did not evaporate, and was intensified in the 1940s during the Second World War and in connection with the increasing successes of the Pakistan movement, which became the elephant in the room. The Communist Party of India’s (CPI) position on nationalism(s) in India was a part of their compromise with the ‘nationalism’ of the Muslim League: To the Muslim masses . . . it appears that the Muslim League leadership is fighting not only for the complete independence of India from imperialist rule but also for freedom

33 Nehru, Discovery of India, Preface, p. 9. 34 Current and earlier versions of Hindu nationalism, for instance, have tended to argue that ‘Hindu’ is so inclusive a category as to be acceptable to everyone, and therefore can be the basis for an Indian national identity, except among people who explicitly reject it, i.e. by implication Muslims. This was clearly not Nehru’s manoeuvre, but it illustrates the impossibility of finding a properly inclusive basis for national belonging, and the rhetorical and hermeneutic possibilities of creating exclusionary arguments with material that was mobilised for inclusionary purposes.

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and equality to territorial units which are predominantly Muslim and for the protection of the rights of Muslim minorities in other provinces in relation to culture, education and language. Thus the rise of the Muslim League influence cannot be regarded as a reactionary phenomenon . . . as soon as we grasp that behind the demand for Pakistan is the justified desire of the people of Muslim nationalities such as Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis (Muslims), Pathans to build their free national life within the greater unity of the allIndian national freedom, we at once see there is a very simple solution to the communal problem in its new phase.35

The communist-proferred model was that of an India of many nations and a projected multi-national Indian state. Elaborated, this meant, according to the Communist Party of India’s publications on the subject, that no nation would need a state in order to feel secure, and that every small national identity claiming a state would in fact produce the very insecurity it sought to combat.36 Perhaps as a consequence of this line, the clarity of which was by no means self-evident to its followers, the CPI was able to find a working relationship in Bengal with a left wing of the Muslim League. From the early 1940s, and in particular after the CPI’s legalisation in 1942 following the Soviet Union’s entry into the ‘People’s War’, the ‘democratisation of the Bengal Muslim League’ took place with Communist support.37 This applied specifically to sections of the Bengal League which had once been the Krishak Praja Party or a part thereof, in particular during the Tebhaga Movement. Muslim sharecroppers who supported the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan nonetheless had the peasant dimension of their identity mobilised by the CPI; party activists recall Muslim peasants attending rallies with the hammer and sickle painted onto their Muslim League flags.38 But strange contortions around the subject of nationalism or national identity, statehood, federation, confederacy, and so on, were very much part of the politics of the 1940s. This has often been pointed out in relation to the language of the retrospectively-named ‘Pakistan Resolution’ (at the time called the ‘Lahore

35 G Adhikari, ‘National Unity Now!’, People’s War, 8 August 1942, reprinted in G. Adhikari (ed), Pakistan and National Unity (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, n.d.). 36 G. Adhikari, ‘National Unity Now!’ Ironically, this position was modelled on the USSR’s nationalities policy, now in the past: Stalin’s invocation of Great Russian chauvinism, in the service first of Stalinist purges and then of wartime discipline and belonging had turned such openness to various ‘national’ cultures, in some cases invented by the Soviet Union itself, into what came to be called ‘national deviationism’. 37 Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999, Chapter 3. 38 Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972).

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Resolution’) of ‘Muslim’ groups gathered together by the Muslim League in 1940 (the Resolution was in fact proposed by Fazlul Haq of the Krishak Praja Party): Resolved that it is the considered view of this Session of the All-India Muslim League that no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to the Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, viz., that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.39

The Resolution avoids, it may be noted, the word ‘nation’. Later on, and in retrospect, in some assessments, Muslim League activists from Bengal appeared to echo the CPI position: they were not in favour of any two-nation theory, but in favour of viewing India as many nations, and were campaigning in support of the Bengali Muslim ‘nation’. In the Lahore Resolution I saw my complete independence as a Muslim and a Bengali and for this I supported the movement based on the Lahore Resolution of 1940 . . . I never believed in Mr Jinnah’s two-nation theory and I never preached this in Bengal. I preached the multi-nation theory. I maintain that India is a Sub-continent and not a country. India consists of many countries and many nations . . . In consideration of the peculiar geographical condition of Assam the Muslim League demanded the independence of Assam with its demand for independence of Bengal. The Muslim League did not contemplate partition of any country of India or partition of the Punjab or of the Punjabis and partition of Bengal or of the Bengalis. Thus there was nothing communal in the Lahore Resolution of 1940.40

The CPI’s position was of course not the Congress’s position; and during negotiations leading up to the transfer of power, it was the Congress and not the CPI that wandered the corridors of power. In 1945, shortly after Nehru and the other Congress leaders had been released from jail to come and talk to the Viceroy at the Simla Conference, Z. A. Ahmad of the CPI was sent to talk to and brief Nehru about the communist position. There had been much bad blood between Congress Socialists and the CPI over the latter’s opposition to the Quit India Movement; in

39 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League, 23 March 1940, reprinted in Jamil-ud-Din Ahmad, Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement, (Lahore: Publishers United, 1970), pp. 381–383. 40 Abul Hashim, In Retrospection (Dhaka: Subarna Publications, 1974), pp. 22–23; quoted in Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’. Italics added by her. In her interpretation, ‘countries’ in this text is a translation of the word desh in Bengali (although the book is written in English).

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addition, the Congress, at the time, was intent on using that opportunity to exclude the CPI from Congress. A strenuous and tense conversation between Nehru and Ahmad ensued, recorded in the terse and purportedly verbatim reportage of the typescript that Ahmad submitted to the CPI General Secretary, P. C. Joshi, after the event. Both Nehru and Ahmad were politicians from the United Provinces, and knew each other relatively well. Ahmad had been United Provinces Provincial Congress Committee Secretary in August 1942, and Nehru had asked for his resignation in the event of a movement launched by Congress that the CPI could not support. Ahmad had agreed. Nehru, though he did not mention this in their 1945 conversation, had himself had difficulties with the Quit India Movement, and had only reluctantly acquiesced in the launching of a movement against the British at the time, with the Japanese on the borders of India. In fact, as he told Ahmad, far from accepting the prospect of Japanese control over India, some sections of the Congress had contemplated organising guerrilla bands to resist the invading Japanese in the event of the latter’s taking control of eastern India.41 But Nehru was insistent that the CPI had gone against ‘national’ sentiment in opposing the movement. In what became a conversation on the problems and nature of the national question in India, with the two protagonists at times apparently speaking at cross-purposes, Ahmad explained the CPI position on Pakistan: it was important to concede a legitimate national demand, but at the same time, aim for a ‘mighty united front [of] our two premier national organisations’, the Congress and the League. In Ahmad’s rendering of the CPI’s views, it is clear that he expected, even in the event of the formation of a ‘Pakistan’ of sorts, a common central government or administration on matters such as defence and foreign policy.42 Nehru explained that concessions to Jinnah and the League would split the Congress. ‘There is a strong anti-Pakistan Hindu opinion inside the Congress which would go over to the Hindu [Maha]Sabha’, Nehru told Ahmad; a split in the Congress would make a League-Congress agreement meaningless, quite apart from the question that Jinnah did not want an agreement and gained much more by saying no than by making his demand clear. The question of the correct attitude to nationalism came to the forefront in the conversation. Nehru, while acknowledging his own admiration and support for the Soviet Union in many matters, criticised the CPI for being overly influenced by

41 Z. A. Ahmad’s notes from his talk with Jawaharlal Nehru, June 1945, ‘not to be shown to anyone else without P. C. Joshi’s [General Secretary, Communist Party of India] permission’, 1945/9, CPI documents, P. C. Joshi Archive, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, pp. 4–5. 42 Z. A. Ahmad’s notes, p. 7.

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Soviet foreign policy interests. An exchange ensued that is well worth rendering in the dialogue form of the original document: Nehru: ‘There are occasions when a purely nationalist attitude comes into conflict with the Communist attitude. The primary thing with the nationalist mind is immediate national interests, while with the Communists other considerations, one of the most important of which is the safety and defence of the Soviet Union, carry a great deal of weight.’ Ahmad: ‘But does our attitude strengthen national interest or weaken it?’ Nehru: ‘Perhaps in the long run your attitude may prove to be more correct, but the fact remains that on certain immediate issues a conflict between the Communists and the national movement does come into existence. You must realise that national sentiment is a very powerful thing. It is a strong factor governing the life of advanced countries but it is far stronger in the colonies. I have myself come to realise this through experience. The national sentiment always hits at the immediate oppressor and we must reckon with it. In 1942 the powerful hatred of the British swayed our people and moved them forward into a country-wide struggle. Your policy on the other hand influenced comparatively a very small section. You could not move millions. Inevitably there arose a sharp conflict between you and the national movement. . . . ’ Ahmad: ‘But if we bend before backward forms of nationalism it would not take us anywhere.’ Nehru: ‘There is no question of bending before it. The fact has to be recognised that the national sentiment is extremely powerful, you cannot just ride roughshod over it. It has to be changed as a process and this takes time.’43

The question as to why this last principle did not apply to the League and to Muslim national interest seems not to have been addressed by Nehru; but his statement that nationalist sentiment had to be dealt with slowly and carefully was one that he appears to have stayed with. Ahmad, on the other hand, reported in some frustration to Joshi: He [Nehru] is convinced that the [1942 Quit India] struggle was right and his mental preoccupation with it and the consequent imperialist repression has blurred his international vision. It is surprising that in a couple of hours’ talk he did not say anything about the international situation which in his case would have been something extraordinary before 1942.44

Ahmad was not, however, willing to give up on Nehru. He was still the most progressive person still within the Congress, and would have to be educated and regularly supplied with Party literature, with the CPI theoreticians briefing

43 ZA Ahmad’s notes, pp. 9–10. 44 ZA Ahmad’s notes, p. 10.

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him regularly. In effect, Nehru would have to be in person, whether he fully accepted this or not, a Communist front organisation. Nehru’s own position, however, emerges relatively clearly from these exchanges: he accepted the ‘narrowness’ of a ‘purely nationalist’ position, and its potential aggressiveness and reactionary nature; but he accepted, as time went by, the need to take some account of ‘national sentiment’ because it was ‘a very powerful thing’. In effect, by acknowledging some nationalist sentiment, whether rhetorically or in practice, a ‘progressive’ position would gain some space to manoeuvre. Thereafter, the ‘masses’, and the ‘nation’ as a whole, could be led away from purely national sentiment because, as the developmental project that was so dear to the Nehruvians took off, economic man would of necessity replace sectarian man; and what was national man but sectarian man writ slightly larger on the historical canvas? The left wing’s ultimate optimism that this economic man existed beneath the veneer of sectarian man (‘[t]he economic bond is stronger than even the national one . . .’, Nehru had written to one of his correspondents in 1931),45 and would gradually emerge as ordinary people began to recognise their real interests apart from the false consciousness of communal loyalties, was an untested assertion, and one that placed a great deal of confidence in the ability of the developmental project to deliver material progress to the majority of people in India. In this sense, of course, it remains an untested assertion.

3 The Exclusions of the Developmental; the (Partial) Suppression of the ‘Cultural’ Meanwhile, with the events surrounding the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan becoming central, ideologues such as Nehru had no answer to questions of identity as expressed in the Partition massacres and the postindependence tendency of organised mobs of Hindus or Sikhs to turn on Muslims; Nehru’s government was forced to recognise that the resettlement of Muslims would have to be more or less on a ghetto principle: they could not feel safe in neighbourhoods where Hindus or Sikhs were a majority.46 Through this period of violence, Nehru and his government or his socialist colleagues

45 Jawaharlal Nehru to M Abdullah, journalist with the Mussalman, 1931, JNP, NML, vol. 1, ff. 21–23. 46 Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru, (London: Routledge, 2004), p 172.

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could do no more than make statements on the irrationality of events and muse on the atavistic tendencies of mobs.47 If they had wanted to see these events in terms of types of nationalism, they found such readings exceedingly difficult. Nonetheless, the transfer of power was made according to a simplified understanding of events that regarded widespread and unprecedented violence as an indication that Hindus and Muslims now could not live together in peace. It also contributed greatly to a view by the political leadership of the ‘masses’ in India as an irrational, potentially violent, and volatile rabble that could not be trusted with too much political initiative. Questions of national identity were entangled in the internal politics of the Indian National Congress as the successor to the British. Before independence, the Congress had claimed to be the representative body capable of speaking for the ‘nation’ as a whole. But the inclusive claims made by the Congress in public, as its internal correspondence makes amply clear, were supported only by its left wing. The Congress as a whole had no coherent vision of India, and within it, there were many who wished to exclude Muslims in particular and non-uppercaste Hindus in general from political power and social status. Behind the scenes, the Congress Right argued that after the partition of India, the matter had been decided: Pakistan was a Muslim state; the residual India would therefore be a Hindu state. It is well known that Nehru disagreed strongly, refusing to reduce Muslims and other non-Hindus in India to the implicit status of foreigners. He intervened frequently in the affairs of the Home Ministry, which he believed was unnecessarily harassing Muslims in their claim to maintain law and order. And largely on the strength of claims that the Congress had repeatedly made in public, he was often able to force the issue towards a non-sectarian definition of being Indian, in the Constituent Assembly, where it was written into the new Republic’s Constitution. But there were moments where the allegedly non-sectarian Indian state betrayed the implicit communitarian logic of its actions, as in the question of the repatriation of ‘abducted women’ to Pakistan and India in the years after Partition. ‘Repatriation’ was often in disregard of the wishes of the women themselves, and with the working assumption that ‘originally’ Hindu women who lived with Muslims in Pakistan belonged back in India.48

47 See for instance, Nehru’s speech at Khusrupore, 4 November 1946, in S Gopal (ed), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, second series, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984- [SWJN II], vol. 1, p 55; his letter to Vallabhbhai Patel, November 5, 1946, SWJN II, vol. 1, pp. 62–65. 48 For a sense of the rhetoric surrounding this, see SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 113–123. Nehru wrote to Rajendra Prasad about abducted women on both sides of the border that ‘[n]either side has really tried hard enough to recover them.’ Letter, 22 January 1948, SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 113–114.

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Nehru himself admitted that he was out of joint with public opinion and with opinion inside the Congress, at the time of independence. The ‘Gandhian’, Rajendra Prasad, demanded that Nehru announce a ban on cow-slaughter as part of the independence celebrations; Nehru had refused to envisage a measure ‘purely on grounds of Hindu sentiment’.49 ‘I find myself in total disagreement with this revivalist feeling’, Nehru wrote to Prasad, ‘and in view of this difference of opinion I am a poor representative of many of our people today.’50 Nehru believed such opinion to be anti-Muslim and pro-Hindu upper caste, and also that at the time of independence, the current of public opinion would have been on the side of the Congress right, which, despite the formal separation of the Hindu Mahasabha as a Hindu communal party from the Congress in 1938, could not as yet be sufficiently distinguished. His strengths were his international connections and his acceptability across the political spectrum: as Gandhi’s anointed successor, as the Harrow- and Trinity-educated intellectual who could parlay with the British on equal terms, and as the acceptable face of the Indian left. His language could become the language of legitimacy of the new Indian state. But to what extent was this language merely one in which public arguments had to be made? What, then, was the developmental alternative to a culturally-defined, and therefore pro-Hindu, nationalism? The goal of ‘national self-sufficiency’ as an escape from what Nehru described as ‘the whirlpool of economic imperialism’,51 and industrialisation as a central plank of that self-sufficiency as India attempted to ‘catch up’ with the advanced countries, drew on an older tradition of nineteenth century economic nationalism that demanded protection for ‘infant industries’ so that they could, with time, compete with foreign industries. In effect, then, the post-independence political economy was set up as a protected national economy, run on capitalist lines with a strong state sector. And with socialists committed to a ‘transition period’, it could be all but admitted that the shared goal was one of achieving a relatively successful capitalism rather than anything that could be recognised as ‘socialism’52 – but the obligatory language of political legitimacy dictated that this was a step too far.

For an account, see Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, ‘Her Body and Her Being: Of Widows and Abducted Women in Post-Partition India’, in Margaret Jolly and Kalpana Ram (ed), Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 58–81. 49 Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 7 August 1947, SWJN II, vol. 3, p 191. 50 Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 7 August 1947, in SWJN II, vol. 3, p 191. 51 Nehru, Discovery of India, p 398. 52 This has been pointed out by retrospective scholarship: see for instance TJ Byres (ed), The State and Development Planning in India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), introduction.

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The state’s strong directorial role was not to everyone’s liking, with old Gandhians like J. B. Kripalani, warning inter alia of the dangers of ‘investing the State with the monopoly of political and economic exploitation, which is what happens in the centralised economy of a communist or a fascist state’.53 (This was of course popular rhetoric in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginning of the Cold War: everything that was to be discredited was called fascist or communist or both, for good measure.) The Gandhians’ insistence that as an alternative to centralised state control, the economy could prosper on a decentralised system of rural self-sufficiency, did not win much support.54 Economics versus sectarianism: this was the formula on the basis of which many public battles were fought. And yet the claimed dichotomy was a false one, and could at times be manipulated by the right wing; it was a matter of using the conventions of argument well enough. One of the earliest such battles took place in 1947 over the first budget of the Interim Government, led by Nehru; the Finance Minister was Liaquat Ali Khan, Muslim League member and later to be Prime Minister of Pakistan. The central feature of Liaquat Ali Khan’s budget was its taxation of the profits made by Indian businessmen through the war period. Liaquat drew the justification for this, he said, from many of the wartime speeches of Nehru himself and of other Congress leaders who deplored the tendency of Indian business to make large profits in collaboration with the government while Indian resources were exploited for the war effort without the consent of any representative body of Indians. Nehru, moreover, had approved the budget before Liaquat presented it to the Assembly. The Congress right vociferously attacked its own government’s budget. Allegedly, Liaquat was leading a communal plot against the Hindus: since he knew that most businessmen were Hindus, he was, as a Muslim, being vindictive.55 The budget was forced to be modified; Nehru failed in public to back Liaquat. The central part of the economics-versus-sectarianism formula, to belabour the point, relied on a socially progressive developmentalism that, in positioning

53 JB Kripalani’s speech on 15 November 1947, reprinted in SL Poplai (ed.), India 1947–1950: Select Documents on Asian Affairs, vol. 1, (Delhi: Institute of Asian Affairs, 1959), pp. 438–442; quote from p 438. 54 On ‘Gandhian’ economic thought, see for instance BN Ghosh, Gandhian Political Economy: Principles, Practice and Policy, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Ajit K Dasgupta, Gandhi’s Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 1996). 55 Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, ‘Indian National Congress and the Indian Bourgeoisie: Liaquat Ali Khan’s Budget of 1947-48’, Occasional Paper No. 85, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, August 1986.

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the state as working for the collective good of the people in general, could claim to harness nationalism on its side without actually needing to define that nationalism. The people were the ultimate beneficiaries of development; the state was the agent of development; the nation and the state were, if not entirely identified with each other, at least in harmony. Unless challenged, therefore, the state was the nation. But the language of developmentalism was open to use also by a capitalist class that was relatively small and able to act relatively coherently. If a capitalist class could present its own role as that of furthering the progress of the ‘nation’ as a whole, it had to utilise the same language of developmentalism that was being used to legitimise the state that a leftist group clustered around Nehru were using. This was clearly recognised: the authors of the ‘Bombay Plan’ of 1944,56 that much-publicised document in which Indian businessmen allegedly signed up to the post-independence socialist or socially-progressive agenda, were clear about what their task had to be: [t]he inevitability of a change in the direction of a socialist economy even in a country like India must now be recognised and leaders of industry would be well advised to take this into account and be prepared to make such adjustments as may meet all reasonable demands before the socialist movement assumes the form of a full fledged revolution. The most effective way in which extremer demands in future may be obviated is for industrialists to take thought while there is yet time as to the best means of incorporating whatever is sound and feasible in the socialist movement. One of the principal tasks of the Committee will therefore be to examine how far socialist demands can be accommodated without capitalism surrendering any of its essential features.57

The terminology around ‘development’ became legitimating window-dressing. In particular, the masses began to be conceptualised in a rather abstract way. There was thus a definite tension between imagining an independent India that was to be for the benefit of the masses (the ‘nation’, represented by the nationalists-who-were-the-Congress, who would run the state) and imagining development in and for India, in which the masses (who would allegedly ultimately be the beneficiaries) were instrumentally cast as material to be moulded to a project that was greater than they. This was enabled by the construction of a language of legitimacy that simultaneously centred on and marginalised the ‘masses’ by subordinating them to a larger, allegedly ‘national’, project.

56 P Thakurdas et al, A Plan of Economic Development for India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944). 57 P Thakurdas papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, File 291 Part II: Post-War Economic Development Committee, ff. 265–6.

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This is evident early on in the public statements around the economy emanating from the new state. The centrality of the anti-imperialist struggle had often led to a deferral of questions of labour rights, wages and welfare, in which the left wing of the nationalist movement had been complicit and even pro-active, on the grounds that the first enemy to be defeated was the imperialist one; this deferral, contrary to the claims made by the left, continued after independence. It happened simultaneously with attempts of sections of the nationalist movement, then organised on a coalitional basis, to mobilise labour behind the national movement, and thereafter behind the nationalist state. The nationalist leadership and the state it controlled thereafter claimed to represent labour and at the same time demanded discipline from the labour force for ‘national’ goals. The central myth that made this possible was that the post-independence Indian state was, or would be, a benign one, or at least a lesser evil. The ‘masses’ were instrumentalised by the custodians of the national state, and the custodians of that state presented themselves as intermediaries between the exploiters (capitalists, landlords) and the exploited (workers, peasants). In March 1947, before the formal transfer of power, but during the time of the Interim Government led by Nehru, an Industrial Disputes Act was passed, which called for the setting up of tribunals for the prevention and settlement of disputes. The Act cast the Government as mediator – a paternalist, or at least avuncular, presence in industrial disputes. The instrumentalisation of labour, allegedly for its own future good, was institutionalised in the split in the trade union movement. The older All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) remained with the Communist Party of India, which had become dominant in the AITUC by the end of the Second World War, and refused to accept the validity of government mediation. The newer Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), dominated by the Congress party, accepted the myth of the benign state: the state, being a national one, was now an impartial intermediary between business and labour, representing the interests of the ‘nation’ as a whole.58 Nehru himself made several statements on the need for collective national action, and of deferring conflict between classes for that greater cause. In a speech in which he referred to himself as the ‘First Servant of the Indian People’ (invoking in his rhetoric the Soviet People’s Commissars of the early days of the Russian Revolution), on 15 August 1947, he reiterated that the predominant problems faced by India were economic: the country was faced with inflation, the people with lack of food and clothing and adequate shelter. ‘Production today is

58 For a contemporary (and perceptive) account, see Richard L Park, ‘Labor and Politics in India’, Far Eastern Survey, August 10, 1949, pp. 181–187.

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the first priority’, he explained, although he added that on its own it would not be enough – the key social question would be one of distribution.59 The rhetoric of the period after 1947 strongly stressed the need for collective and disciplined national progress, for production before distribution could be achieved, and consequently for harmonious industrial relations. Change would come, but it would be relatively gradual, consensual, and rely on the education of the masses and the initiatives of the state. Vested interests would be confronted by the authority of the state, represented by the national government, which in effect was the Congress – and the vested interests represented by the Congress were not to be acknowledged in public. But the masses were to be increasingly disarmed of their own right to decide on what their interests really were. With the emphasis placed on ‘nation-building’, industrialists and workers were asked to work together for the collective good. Nehru himself acted as intermediary, declaring to industrialists that ‘indiscipline among labour’ was indeed a problem, but that industrialists had to stop blaming labour, or agitators among labour, for their problems, and asking industrialists to set up industries for the benefit of ‘400 million Indians and not a few industrialists and capitalists’, even as he called for workers to refrain from strikes.60 Some of his rhetoric was beginning to sound dangerously close to (in fact, as if drawn from) Gandhi’s ‘trusteeship’ theory, which Nehru and the left had once so ridiculed: that the rich hold their wealth as trustees for the nation, and that they therefore must (or could be expected to) act in the national interest. Nehru maintained that the Government could not afford to leave industrial disputes to be fought out in terms of strikes, especially when there was a crisis in production.61 An Industries Conference in New Delhi on 18 December 1947 agreed to maintain ‘industrial peace’, to avoid lock-outs, strikes, or in general to avoid the slowing down of production for the next three years; Nehru’s address again stressed the primacy of production, lest there otherwise be nothing left to distribute.62 Nevertheless, this was a period of industrial unrest: there were strikes in Bombay and Kanpur in December and January, as well as a food crisis; a 29 December strike of 60 labour unions in Bombay (with dockyard and port trust workers demanding higher wages) had been called on 14 December,

59 Press statement, August 15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Volume One: September 1946-May 1949, New Delhi, 2nd edn, November 1958, p 27. 60 Speech to the Associated Chambers of Commerce, Calcutta, 15 December 1947, SWJN II, vol. 4, pp. 563–4. 61 Address to the Associated Chambers of Commerce, Calcutta, 15 December 1947, SWJN II, vol. 4, pp. 556–70. 62 SWJN II, vol. 4, pp. 570–579.

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before the ‘truce’ call of 18 December. The strikers were against the adjudication machinery that involved the government as allegedly neutral, and against decontrol of prices at a time of food shortages. Nehru was critical of socialists for breaking the strike truce, which was also about the time when the socialists seceded from the Congress.63 That this rhetoric of collective progress did not convince everyone was always evident. Evidence for the failure of the argument of the state’s neutrality can be found from a very unlikely source: in a self-assessment of its functioning provided by a confidential report from the INTUC itself in 1952, five years after its founding. In the previous five years, the report stated, INTUC membership had increased rapidly, not least due to ‘the feeling among the working class that the INTUC had the moral backing and support of the Government and that it could secure concessions for workers, through political pressure.’ The INTUC in turn ‘pursued a policy of complete collaboration with the Government[,] so much so, that in the estimation of the working class, the distinction between the Government and the INTUC became rather thin.’ The membership among the working classes had now, in the estimation of the author of the report, Harihar Nath Shastri, peaked. Although the policy of collaboration had been both correct in the context of 1947, and had in fact been the decisive factor in enabling the INTUC to ‘develop our organisation so quickly’, labour had been disillusioned over the last five years by the INTUC’s failure to protect them against ‘pro-capitalists’ [sic] Congress governments, especially in the States.64 The report is written with a keen sense of the main competitor to INTUC, the communists; and while it claimed (without giving reasons why) that the communists had ‘betrayed’ the working class,65 it also asserted that the close relationship of the INTUC with the Congress needed to be rethought, as it was becoming a major liability. While cautiously recognising the need for some cooperation with industry ‘in national interests’ where feasible, and taking recourse to structures of mediation and ‘constitutional machinery’ where possible, it was necessary, ‘[i]n select cases of stubborn employers like Birlas [sic], to prepare for and give determined fight in form of direct action.’66 The INTUC was otherwise in danger of losing its credibility.67

63 SWNJ II, vol. 4, pp. 578–79. 64 ‘Strictly Confidential: A Note on the Future Working of the INTUC’, HN Shastri Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, 190 (XXVI), Sl. No. 1, pp. 1–2. 65 ‘Strictly Confidential: A Note on the Future Working of the INTUC’, p 1. 66 ‘Strictly Confidential: A Note on the Future Working of the INTUC’, p 3. 67 Ironically, the above report is to be found in a set of papers that consist mainly of press statements on behalf of the INTUC, inter alia accusing the AITUC of ‘reducing itself to being the trade union mouth piece of the Communist Party of India’ (HN Shastri Papers, NML, 190 (XXVI),

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Very early on in the life of the new Indian state, therefore, it became clear that in its operation, the developmental imagination excluded the representatives of non-elite groups from making decisions pertaining to the ‘nation’. Exclusion based on a common commitment to a developmental project claiming to be for their benefit, in a paternalistic appropriation on the part of an allegedly benign state and its government, was, in being ‘developmental’, also largely non-‘cultural’; to what extent such exclusions, based on class, and therefore not ‘national’ exclusions, were less exclusionary than those potentially based on ‘culture’ remains open to question. Meanwhile, the details of finding the identity of the new Indian state continued to run into difficulties. Opinion in the Constituent Assembly, the body assigned the task of writing a new Constitution, was not exactly progressive or developmentalist; the gravity of the task at hand was not necessarily felt by all concerned, and it was not uncommon for proceedings to be disrupted by the absolute refusal of an Honourable Member to speak in English, in which language he could be widely understood, and his insistence on speaking in Hindi, which many members, especially those from the south of India, did not understand.68 An apparently tolerant view of the Indian political order was provided in a speech to the Constituent Assembly on 11 December 1946, at the height of the sectarian violence leading up to Partition, by Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, erstwhile Oxford professor of Indian religions and future President of the Republic, underlining the fact that the fundamental task of the Assembly was to provide a non-sectarian framework for a future Constitution: a nation does not depend on identity of race, or sentiment, or on ancestral memories, but it depends on a persistent and continuous way of life that has come down to us. Such a way of life, belongs to the very soil of this land. It is there indigenous to this country as much as the waters of the Ganges or the snows of the Himalayas. From the very roots of our civilization down in the Indus Valley to the present day, the same great culture is represented among Hindus and Muslims, we have stood for the ideal of comprehension and charity all these centuries.

Sl. No. 4, p.1, n.d., but c. 1947), and strongly denying that the INTUC was ‘sponsored by and supported by the Government of India and the Provincial Governments’ (HN Shastri Papers, NML, 190 (XXVI), Sl. No. 5, p. 19., n.d., but c. 1947). It is apparent that within five years, Shastri had been at least privately convinced of the accuracy of the views of the INTUC’s critics. 68 Shri R. V. Dhulekar. [translation from Hindustani]: ‘People who do not know Hindustani have no right to stay in India. People who are present in this House to fashion out a constitution for India and do not know Hindustani are not worthy to be members of this Assembly. They had better leave.’ http://www.goodgovernanceindia.com/pdf/Constituent-Assembly-Debates.pdf, quote on p. 39, accessed 28.01.2020. The official version from the Parliament of India website is no longer to be found: it was once at http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/vol1p2.htm.

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... India is a symphony where there are, as in an orchestra, different instruments, each with its particular sonority, each with its special sound, all combining to interpret one particular score. It is this kind of combination that this country has stood for. It never adopted inquisitorial methods. It never asked the Parsis or the Jews or the Christians or the Muslims who came and took shelter there to change their creeds or become absorbed in what might be called a uniform Hindu humanity. It never did this. ‘Live and let live’ – that has been the spirit of this country. If we are true to that spirit, if that ideal which has dominated our cultural landscape for five or six thousand years and is still operating, I have no doubt that the crisis by which we are faced today will be overcome as many other crises in our previous history have been overcome. Suicide is the greatest sin. To murder yourself, to betray yourself, to barter away your spiritual wealth for a mess of pottage, to try to preserve your body at the expense of your spirit – that is the greatest sin. If we therefore stand out for the great ideal for which this country has stood, the ideal which has survived the assaults of invaders, the ideals to which the unheeding world today is turning its attention, if we are able to do it, the flame which has sustained us in overcoming foreign rule, will fire our efforts to build a united and free India.69

Whether there is a slight majoritarian undertone in the assumption that the ‘original’ inhabitants did not make demands upon outsiders or ‘invaders’ to ‘change their creeds’ is a matter of reading intention, which historians are unable to do in retrospect; but in the context of that troubled year of 1946, the sentiments were welcome. The Constituent Assembly was elected on a property franchise in 1946, in response to which many socialists boycotted it, refusing to accept that such an unrepresentative body could draw up a constitution that would command legitimacy in the years to come; its membership was also curtailed by the boycott by the Muslim League members and the secession of Pakistan during its discussions.70 Both ‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ opinion stood divided along socialist and capitalist lines. Gandhians and other defenders of ‘tradition’ managed to assert themselves at times, making the constitutional document an ambiguous compromise of divergent tendencies that remained in tension. Gandhi’s own views on the necessarily spiritual basis for a morally upright and culturally rooted ‘authentic’ Indian politics sat uneasily with the need for a non-sectarian and non-religious basis for Indian national belonging. Gandhi, of course, was not directly a party to debates in the Constituent Assembly and elsewhere. His major contribution to the silencing of Hindu 69 Dr S Radhakrishnan’s address to the Constituent Assembly, Wednesday 11th December 1946, http://www.goodgovernanceindia.com/pdf/Constituent-Assembly-Debates.pdf, quote on pp. 55–56, accessed 28.01.2020. 70 Zachariah, Nehru, p 147.

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sectarian and fundamentalist opinion at this time was in being shot by a Hindu. Thereafter, Nehru and the Congress left were able to mobilise public opinion behind themselves and to discredit, in public debate, Hindu sectarian positions that had so recently claimed the life of the Mahatma.71 The ‘cultural’ in the ‘developmental’ also needs to be highlighted. A developmental project required some sense of social reform, in the older sense known in India of reforming socio-religious institutions, as well as in the socioeconomic sense, for instance, of land reforms.72 It has been pointed out that the boundary between social reform and religious reformation in many of these debates was very difficult to draw,73 due in no small part to the fact that British Indian political discourse positioned India as a fundamentally religious society. Social reform of various kinds was also central to the claimed developmental agenda of the state: ‘backward’ institutions should be swept away, caste distinctions abolished, and a form of citizenship that rendered questions of sectarian identity irrelevant had to be found. At the same time, all social reform also ran into questions of how far a state could interfere with ‘tradition’. There was the added danger that the adjudicators of what ‘tradition’ ought to be tended to be conservative male leaders of sects or religious organisations. And if continuing special representation for the ‘Backward Castes’ or ‘Scheduled Castes’ ran into the question of whether this in fact militated against the avowed aim of destroying these distinctions altogether, the question of preserving or reforming ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ laws also raised the question of whether these should also be abolished. The Nehruvian state worked largely on the basis that ‘minorities’ should not be made to feel insecure in the new state by having their institutions subject to attack from the state. Treading softly on matters relating to minorities, the state therefore started on the reform of ‘Hindu’ law, with the intention, allegedly, to tackle Muslim law at a later date, and with the avowed ultimate aim of a uniform and secular civil code. But the ‘Hindu Code Bill’ ran into many difficulties as the self-proclaimed defenders of the ‘community’ sought to defend ‘tradition’. It eventually became four separate pieces of legislation: marriage, divorce, succession

71 SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 35–36, ‘The light has gone out of our lives’, All-India Radio broadcast by Nehru, 30 January 1948; resolutions on Gandhi’s death, 2 February 1948, SWJN II, vol. 5, pp. 37–38. 72 On land reform debates see Suhit Sen, ‘The Transitional State: Congress and Government in U.P., c.1946–57’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1998, especially pp 135–171. 73 Amiya P Sen (ed), Social and Religious reform: the Hindus of British India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), introduction.

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and adoption. This eventually satisfied the demand for the state to take a proactive role in social reform as part of a developmentalist agenda,74 but it also tended paradoxically towards establishing the ‘normal’ citizen as a Hindu. The details are less important for the purposes of this argument than the question of how the debates operated: ‘communities’ had laws and rights to themselves; custodians of the rights of a ‘community’ were its ‘leaders’, usually self-appointed and male; Muslims, by being left out of questions of social reformist legislation, were exceptional citizens. (This is not to suggest that this was intentional; indeed, the purpose was to establish that the existence of minorities and of difference was acknowledged by the state, and that the sense of vulnerability of minorities was recognised in a democracy based on numerical majorities. Nevertheless, the logic of the position reified the idea of ‘communities’, and a ‘nation’ of ‘communities’ rather than of individuals.) The formula of ‘community development’, too, must be seen as an incorporation of ‘indigenist’ and ‘cultural’ discursive trends into the developmental, although it must be said that the claims made on its behalf were often short of ‘national’. Decentralised initiatives on rural welfare were from 1952 known collectively as ‘Community Development’ schemes, which incorporated Gandhi as a crucial legitimating icon. As land reform measures stalled, the unofficial bhoodan (land donations) and gramdan (village donations) movement was launched by the ascetic figure of Vinoba Bhave. The movement, meant as an adjunct to the official Community Development initiatives, attracted much publicity. It was hailed by pro-Western Cold Warriors as a non-confrontationist and non-communist trend towards redistribution, which could be seen as authentically Indian, non-violent and safe. What such observers neglected to mention – unlike the official report – was the poor quality of much of the land, and in some cases the uncultivable land that had been donated.75 But the legitimating possibilities of such donations were not lost on the donors, as they had not been lost on other opportunist donors to Gandhian causes before.

74 Flavia Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women’s Rights in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Reba Som, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill: A Victory of Symbol over Substance?’ Modern Asian Studies 28, 1 (1994), pp.165–194; Rebecca Grapevine, ‘Family Matters: Citizenship and Marriage in India, 1939–72’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2015. 75 Government of India, Planning Commission, Gramdan Movement: a Handbook (New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1964), p. 2.

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4 Internationalism, Non-alignment and the the Erosion of the Nehruvian Nehru’s statecraft, as we have seen, involved treating states as well as the nationalisms they contained or espoused as potentially disruptive, irrational and unnecessary, and attempting to find ways around them, while acknowledging the importance of the nation-state idea as a legitimating one. The Indian left position, and Nehru’s in particular, was always one of internationalism, albeit one that was elitist, self-proclaimed, and understood at the time as meaning the actual interconnectedness of the world rather than a commitment of the ‘masses’ to that ideal. In 1938, Nehru flew to Barcelona in the last days of the beleaguered Spanish Republic. His journalistic despatches from Prague during the crisis of 1938 and the Munich Agreement were clear on the interlocking of world affairs.76 But the route to internationalism lay through various intermediary steps. One of these was Pan-Asianism. To some extent, this category had been appropriated by Japanese imperialism, and therefore was not properly available for use by progressives by the 1930s. To some extent, again, it had its own and earlier parochial antecedents in India, where the stereotypical East-West dichotomy was normatively reversed to give primacy to the mystic and spiritual east as against the merely materialistic west. For Gandhi, Japan’s transition to a fully industrialised economy as opposed to a cottage industry economy was a betrayal of Japan’s Asianness.77 Japan in particular was something of an example for Indians who thought about national self-strengthening, by virtue of its military and industrial successes, when measured against ‘Western’ powers. Japan’s 1905 victory against the allegedly ‘Western’ power, Russia, was widely seen in India as proof that the ‘West’ could be humbled, and therefore as a surrogate victory for India/Asia.78 This strand was still well-represented in the 1930s. When Nehru went to China just before the outbreak of the Second World War, at Sir Stafford Cripps’ request to make contact with Chiang Kai-Shek, Rabindranath Tagore, in the last years of his life, requested Nehru to also go to Japan and to tell the Japanese that in their new militarism they were betraying their Asian heritage. Nehru did not think that the Japanese were in the mood to listen.79 Devoid of the mystic east argument that some of its protagonists used, Nehru’s version was more pragmatic, and postulated directly as a potential

76 National Herald signed article, 4 December 1938, SWJN vol. 9, pp. 216–18. 77 See Ajit K Dasgupta, Gandhi’s Economic Thought, (London: Routledge, 1996). 78 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908, (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House, 1973). 79 SWJN vol. 10, pp. 83–4.

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pathway to internationalism of a wider kind. Nehru managed retrospectively to claim a version of pan-Asianism as an idea that – after the Bandung Conference and non-alignment as well as due to his insistence on good relations with China as a fellow Asian power – became associated with non-alignment of a sort, with anticolonialism, and by analogy with pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, with its concomitant flaws and advantages; indeed, the last two could be said to have been influenced by Nehruvian nationalism, at least in the Nkrumah and Nasser versions.80 The erosion of this vision can be traced through two interconnected examples: the problems of the North-East Frontier Agency and the Chinese borders. Just as the borders with China were ambiguous, the peripheral areas of India were only a part of the Indian Union through accidents of colonial history and its arbitrary borders. The ‘tribal areas’ of north-eastern India, under colonial administration, were separated from the rest of India by an ‘inner line’; the ‘outer line’ then divided it from the outside world – an ‘outer line’ whose precise position was not clearly known.81 This division was inherited by independent India. Potential secessionist tendencies had been identified in the Naga areas of the north-east early on by Nehru, at the time of the Interim Government. The retention of these areas in India was impossible to justify by virtue of ‘national’ models. There was no particular reason why they should have shared an Indian nationalist sentiment, as Nehru himself acknowledged: ‘Our freedom movement reached these people only in the shape of occasional rumours. Sometimes they reacted rightly and sometimes wrongly.’82 (By this, apparently, Nehru applied to the behaviour of the ‘tribals’ a yardstick of legitimacy that was based on a ‘right’ attitude to Indian nationalism.) After independence, Nehru believed, the Naga areas ought to be a part of India and of Assam. He offered concessions: ‘It is our policy that tribal areas

80 Nkrumah invoked Nehru consciously: Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, London: Panaf, 1963. Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom (London: Panaf, 1973 [1961]), pp. 159, 160, 223, 276. Nasser was given his first major international forum by Nehru at Bandung: see GH Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber, 1966), esp. pp. 200, 202, 208–9. Nasser was in close touch with Indian diplomatic opinion, especially during the Suez Crisis: this is evident in newspaper reports: see the Statesman for 1956. 81 Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Cape, 1970), pp. 25–6, 30, 32, 34. For a perspective on Sino-Indian relations that includes perspectives and documents from the Chinese side, but nevertheless cannot altogether avoid the teleology of the 1962 ‘war’ or ‘border dispute’, see Anton Harder, ‘Defining Independence in Cold War Asia: Sino-Indian Relations, 1949–1962’, unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 2015. 82 Speech, June 1952, quoted in KS Singh (ed.), Jawaharlal Nehru, Tribes and Tribal Policy, (Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, 1989), p 2.

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should have as much freedom and autonomy as possible so that they can live their own lives according to their own customs and desires’. They could expect protection from being ‘swamped by people from other parts of the country’ and consequently from being exploited.83 He seemed quite unconscious of the patronising language and the colonial rhetoric of his pronouncements: The tribal people of India are a virile people who naturally went astray sometimes. They quarrelled and occasionally cut off each other’s heads . . . . It is often better to cut off a hand or a head than to crush and trample on a heart. Perhaps I also felt happy with these simple folk because the nomad in me found congenial soil in their company.84

Here, the developmental imperative that would allegedly make nationals of reluctant potential nationals was to be central; and in some ways it was more explicit than elsewhere.85 But a modernising agenda that depended on the prior interpretation of that agenda by outside agents, and thereafter its application to its alleged beneficiaries by force, was bound to be resisted. Indian attempts at ‘nation-building’ by force of arms, with the Indian ‘defence forces’ indulging in large-scale killing and rape were hardly the best ways of demonstrating to the North-East of India the warm and enveloping joys of belonging to the Indian state. The history of the incorporation of Nagaland into the ‘nation’ is an extremely violent one, as is the history of the incorporation of the residual category described as the ‘North-East’ into ‘India proper’, and one that is dominated by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, under which that area is in a continuous state of emergency and subject to the whims of soldiers whose propensity for violence and rape has become well-established.86 Connections to the eventual border conflict with China are obvious: the question of inheritance of colonial borders, and that of who belongs within them. Nehru initially argued that it was not worth fighting over wasteland that no one inhabited. Various other groups refused to cede any ground to the mlecchas, infidel barbarians who were defiling the sacred soil of India.87 Nehru was gradually pushed into more and more assertive positions. Meanwhile, development planners who were looking closely at Chinese experiments with cooperative farming

83 Letter to Naga National Council, reprinted in the National Herald of 2/10/46, SWJN II, vol. 2 p 604. 84 Speech, June 1952, quoted in KS Singh (ed.), Jawaharlal Nehru, Tribes and Tribal Policy, pp. 2–3. 85 See also Verrier Elwin, A Philosophy for NEFA (Shillong: North East Frontier Agency, 1959). 86 Duncan McDuie-Ra, ‘Fifty-year disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Exceptionalism in a South Asian periphery’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2009), pp. 255–270. 87 Maxwell, India’s China War, passim.

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were forced away from these efforts as everything Chinese became anathema.88 Then, when the border dispute flared up into direct warfare in late 1962, citizenship rights were withdrawn from Indians of Chinese origin.89 Since the ‘problem’ of Indian citizenship and belonging usually takes the form of looking at Muslims, this often goes unnoticed. But this particular pairing of examples exposes the problems of a nationalism that attempts to refuse to define itself except as a common project of citizenship intended towards collective development or progress. ‘We’ all belong within our borders, within which we conduct development; that assumes a stability of borders and also an enforcement of belonging within those borders. Indian developmentalism took the national territory (the territory of the state) for granted; but it is forced at times to make the question of nationalism explicit. Moments of crisis and uncertainty expose certain groups to the possibility that they will suddenly find themselves excluded. The implicit assumptions behind belonging to the nation (state) can emerge at such moments at which the implicit congruence between a territorial nationalism and developmentalism must be made explicit; and that territoriality suddenly defines as outsiders those who (in this case visually) do not fit: Indian citizens, constitutionally, have a fundamental right to move freely and settle in any part of India, and do not require passports or identity papers, which makes nationality difficult to prove or disprove for many people. Developmentalism is thus always also, at least potentially, a nationalism whose chauvinist assumptions are held in reserve.

Conclusions: The Myth of the Benign State The Nehruvian case illustrates the point this book keeps returning to: it is futile to search for a serviceable nationalism that is less than exclusionary or oppressive; nationalisms draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, impose belonging and non-belonging, and police these. Nationalism, even when it is a search for unifying factors, ends up squeezing or coercing identities towards neat formulations

88 Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 167–8. 89 Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 186, n. 116, mentions the ‘ethnicisation of the nation’ in connection with the China War and cites the relevant legislation. See also Kwai-Yun Li, ‘Deoli Camp: An Oral History of Chinese Indians from 1962 to 1966’, unpublished MA thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada, 2011; Yin Marsh, Doing Time with Nehru: The Story of an Indian-Chinese Family (Delhi: Zubaan, 2015).

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that inevitably exclude. These tendencies remain suppressed as long as nationalism remains a phase of uneasy and unexamined cohesion between self-appointed leaders. The primacy of ‘development’, as initially presented in Indian political arguments, was a leftist position, not shared by the right and by much of the centre: economic advancement towards socialism and the end of sectarianism. In this version, it makes little sense to talk of a developmental ‘nationalism’ in that this ‘nationalism’ fails to draw the required boundaries clearly enough. The eventual ‘developmentalist’ position was, however, nationalist, parochial and indigenist, at least implicitly. The exclusions of developmentalism need to be highlighted, by class; the top-down, wait-for-us-to-lead position was differently exclusionary, not necessarily less so, than an exclusion based on ‘culture’. The cultural was only a step away, hidden from view by a different language of legitimation: there was a strong presence of Hindu nationalism, at least by default. Exclusions were based on being non-Hindu, and Hindu usually meant upper-caste, just as ‘national’ at least implicitly often meant being upper-caste Hindu. The ‘tribals’, being backward, needed to be developed by the Indian state, so that they might know that they belong. If they didn’t, the message was delivered by force. The ‘masses’ were an abstraction in the arguments of the protagonists – the role of ‘development’ in these arguments was not as a means of the ‘uplift of the masses’ alone, or even primarily; the arguments were self-legitimating ones, put forth by political activists in search of a role. It is not necessary to suggest that this was purely cynical use of a vocabulary that was legitimating as a result of having acquired its legitimating capacity over previous years of struggle and was now available for (mis)use. There was of course an element of this: even businessmen dressed their future desires as socialism and as beneficial to the masses and the ‘nation’. But the question we need to consider here is why this marginalisation of the masses or their reduction to a rhetorical device could occur also among the very people whose sincerity and personal sacrifices in attempting to work for better conditions for the urban or rural poor had been well-established at great personal cost. Many ‘Nehruvians’ sought to serve the ‘masses’ only in a distanced sense; it might seem logical that this self-proclaimed intellectual elite, using organisations such as the Planning Commission to blunt the retarding effects of the ‘democratic process’ which might at times seem to serve the right rather than the ‘progressives’, might have wished to keep control of delicate times rather than leave things to the vicissitudes of labour unrest. International pressures are often underestimated in these processes; Nehru’s governments were engaged in a delicate balancing act to achieve some kind of effective independence for India in a

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world of Cold War pressures and accusations of communism or quasicommunism. ‘Demobilisation’ of labour would not always have been the way they saw it; ‘realism’ and ‘national unity’ were both less-than-cynically held views at the time. Integral to these plans was the acceptance of the myth of a benign state. The characterisation of the state as an organ of class rule, and consequently the importance of identifying who the ruling classes were in a given state, could not be allowed to be brought out into the open. Instead, ‘national’ solidarity and ‘nation-building’, both of which had been important concepts under imperial rule, were to be invoked. The national state, as opposed to the colonial state, was assumed to have the interests of its citizens at its core; and the Congress, which was the legitimate heir of the national movement, would automatically embody these interests – or so the myth ran. Nehru himself said that he did not believe either in the nationalism that this implied or in the necessarily benign nature of the state: nationalism for him was an obsolete idea and only survived in the absence of national freedom, and he was clearly conscious of divergences in class interests. But in public he accepted, and promoted, the myth. Their own good intentions notwithstanding, it cannot have been lost on persons of Nehru’s standing and experience that in effect theirs was a government of an intellectual elite whose members’ loyalties were spread across the political spectrum. As to the class that was represented in the state, those on the left sought to ensure that businessmen’s interests were not too directly translated into government policy. In effect, they recognised that the postindependence government was still a coalition. By casting themselves as a benign directing elite that would achieve, gradually and through a ‘transitional period’, socialism/social justice/the ‘socialistic pattern’, this left-ish tendency, acting allegedly in the ‘national interest’, could do more, or so they might have thought, for the ‘masses’ than the ‘masses’ could do for themselves. The ‘masses’ were slightly, if not gravely, distrusted by them; and, by acting on their own, the ‘masses’ could both wreck their own chances of something more in the future and the ‘nation’s’ chances of survival and progress. The ‘benign state’ myth owed much to the self-image of these persons of leftish tendency. The assumption, unfortunately, was that the state would always remain in the possession of ‘people like us’, endorsed from a distance, periodically by the ‘masses’, who would nonetheless trust the custodians of the benign state to do the right thing. (It was therefore not the right but the left who contributed most to the building-up of this myth.) Of course, in this context a mobilised labour movement could be more of a hindrance than a help; the tripartite structure would on the other hand enable a two-to-one victory for the ‘masses’ as long as the negotiators on the government’s side could be the left-ish intellectuals.

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It is necessary to leave an argument based on implicit workings of legitimating languages slightly open-ended, if only because in specific cases, the dynamics of legitimacy and Realpolitik would need to be separately worked out. However, it may be pointed out that a suspicion of the state and its organs is not built into the Indian leftist establishment. For the state was, and would continue to be, run by ‘people like us’; and the bastard Leninism of the CPI or the ‘Cambridge-New Delhi’ axis of politicians, technocrats and civil servants could not conceive of a time when characters more vulgar and crude than Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad or their latter-day successors might succeed in seizing control. A point regarding the coalitional nature of Nehruvian governance might need to be made more strongly in the light of further research: explicitly, this was a coalition between the left and right within the Congress, a compromise system that was noted in the early political science literature on India.90 Implicitly, however, there appears to have been a coalition between the left in the Congress and the left outside it: this is evident in the Communist Party of India’s strategy of supporting Nehru himself (as a lesser evil) while criticising the Congress; Nehru thus became, in some senses, the last great Communist front organisation in India.

90 Myron Weiner, Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); AH Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–64 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Chapter 6 The Volk and Fascism The genealogies of völkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that they were relatively widespread in a world thinking about defining the nature of nationalism. The Volk originated in German romanticist imaginings of the German nation.1 ‘Volk’ and ‘völkisch’ translate into English, both as noun and adjective, as ‘folk’; but they have racial connotations in German that they do not necessarily have in English; and these connotations are integral to the use this chapter makes of the terms. The glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India, the identification of the ‘folk element’, or a connection with sacred soil and sacred space, shared the same building blocks of romantic nationalism that were evident across the world. Völkisch ideas straddle the area of uncertainty at the boundaries of fascism and its wider contexts. Indian völkisch nationalism and its connection with Indian fascist imaginaries has yet to properly enter an analysis of political thinking in India; but these terms are necessary conceptual tools, heuristic devices, and contemporary actor-centric perspectives at one and the same time. It is important to take seriously the continuities of Volk, race and fascism, which have been explored in European contexts but not taken particularly seriously for India, while not making the assumption that these notions were foreign to Indian social and political contexts and therefore borrowed from outside. Not every idea or practice that went into fascism and/or was retrospectively recognised as belonging to fascist formations necessarily and inevitably belonged there; the histories of such ideas or practices have to be written backwards as well as forwards. These include what was claimed by fascists or attributed by antifascists to fascists in a telos of the ‘development’ of fascism as well as a set of ideas that were common to a Zeitgeist where fascism was emergent and off which it fed, but which were not completely subsumable within its boundaries – eugenics, the idea of disciplining the body and the body politic, or various engagements with ‘folk’ practices in the search for an authentic ‘nation’. The literatures on fascism and on India are only recently beginning to

1 For two approaches to the völkisch in Germany, see Uwe Puschner, Die Völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Sprache – Rasse – Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001); and Stefan Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-007

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speak to each other.2 On the one hand, fascism is too easily seen as a European phenomenon inadequately understood elsewhere and therefore imitated without a complete understanding of the ‘original’.3 On the other hand, in India, fascism or proto-fascist tendencies have long been seen as the preserve of a Hindu right-wing, whose presence was for a long time largely ignored in the historiography of South Asia except as a fringe group, until its evident power and political influence in relatively recent times necessitated a closer engagement.4 But here too, deeper intellectual, institutional and organisational, or social histories of engagements with fascism are not available. Many histories or analyses of Hindutva simply avoid the uncomfortable question of fascism;5 those that do not, rely mainly on the connections some of these Hindutva ideologues had with fascism in Europe.6 A few studies attempt a more ideologically nuanced reading of India in the light of similarities with fascism,7 but ‘nuance’

2 Barring a few stray references in survey articles or books on ‘global’ fascism, the idea that Indian fascisms have to be taken as seriously as other members of the fascist family in the early years of the twentieth century has not yet taken firm root. See Debojit Thakur, ‘Fascio indica’, unpublished MA dissertation, Central European University, Budapest, 2019. My own work has addressed this question for some years now; and a longer work by me on Indian fascism follows in the near future. 3 See Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a non-Eurocentric understanding of fascism’, Transcultural Studies, December 2014, pp. 63–100; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c.1922–1945’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (ed), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 178–209. The theoretical issues raised in this introduction are dealt with in more detail in Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung?’. 4 For example, Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 5 (Jan. 30, 1993): 163–167; Marzia Casolari, ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s. Archival Evidence,’ Economic & Political Weekly, 22 (January 2002): 218–228; Tobias Delfs, Hindu-Nationalismus und europäischer Faschismus: Vergleich, Transfer- und Beziehungsgeschichte (Hamburg: EB-Verlag, 2008); and Jairus Banaji (ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2013). 5 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s. Strategies of Identity-Building, Implantation and Mobilisation (London: Hurst, 1996); Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle, Brotherhood in Saffron: The RSS and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987). 6 For example Casolari, ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up’; Delfs, Hindu-Nationalismus und europäischer Faschismus. 7 The work of Jairus Banaji stands out in this respect: see ‘Trajectories of fascism: extreme right movements in India and elsewhere’, in Banaji (ed), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India, pp. 215–230. See also Dilip Simeon, ‘The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism’, pp. 153–214 in the same volume.

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turns easily to equivocation and apologia.8 Meanwhile, the event-history of a few Indians, among them a would-be Führer or Duce, who collaborated with the Nazi regime during the Second World War, provides us with an ersatz debate, the ‘f’ question reduced to methodologically suspect assumptions and arguments about their intentionality and ideology.9 There are historiographical and institutional reasons for these blockages. The tendencies within South Asian academic writing, and in particular those which pass under the name of ‘postcolonial’, are largely responsible for the isolation of South Asianists from any wider debate. Armed with an idea of exceptionalism, a politics of comparative victimhood, and the polarities of ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’, much of the legitimised and reified scholarship of the last thirtyodd years proclaimed that South Asia was ‘different’; but as time went by, the collective memory of scholars no longer contained an idea of what South Asia was different from. As a result, a default mechanism of ‘separate but equal’ dominated the study of history, with South Asia being edged back into its place in the relative isolation of ‘area studies’ – a paradoxical result of what after all claimed to be a movement for cognitive and epistemological justice – and the big comparative questions that had once been asked, for instance by sociologists or Marxists or internationalists of various description, were relegated to the dustbin of historiography.10 The idea that Indian history could be read with and against the rise of fascism, and that several historical actors in India read themselves in exactly that way, was therefore mostly a non-starter, though contemporary observers were less self-censoring in using the term.

8 See for instance Mario Prayer, ‘Self, Other and alter idem: Bengali Internationalism and Fascist Italy in the 1920s and 30s’, Calcutta Historical Journal, vol. 26, no.1 (January–June 2006): 1–32; Maria Framke, Delhi-Rom-Berlin: die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922–1939 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013). 9 A “Netaji” [Mr Führer]-focused list could easily get very long, with contemporary accounts, memoirs of allies, associates and admirers, followers of a once-and-future-king, and so on. But of the more sensible literature, see, for instance, Johannes Voigt, Indien im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt, 1978); Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy. Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Romain Hayes, Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence, and Propaganda 1941–43 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Jan Kuhlmann, Subhas Chandra Bose und die Indienpolitik der Achsenmächte (Berlin: Schiler Verlag, 2003); Hans-Bernd Zöllner, Der Feind meines Feindes ist mein Freund. Subhas Chandra Bose und das zeitgenössisches Deutschland unter dem Nationalsozialismus. 1933–1943 (Münster: Lit, 2000). 10 See Benjamin Zachariah, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019).

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While recognising the importance of caution in using the category of ‘fascism’, because the potential for ‘concept-inflation’ caused by its casual use makes it unavailable for serious political use, I have here used an approach that does not rigidly suggest that there is a ‘fascist minimum’ – a checklist of characteristics without which a near-fascism fails to qualify as a fascism.11 There are a few distinctions that emerge from a long-standing set of antifascist political debates, and a growing interface between political practitioners on the ground actually engaged in battles with (neo-)fascists of various description and academics. They are, in brief, the distinctions between a fascist movement in search of state power, and a fascism in possession of the state;12 and the distinction between fascism in its own core period, between the two world wars and during the second, and fascism afterwards, that is, when its key categories and dominant discourses stood (at least for a time, and in some contexts) discredited and had to be routed through alternatives. It is important to realise, however, that the framing narrative for fascism has become the Holocaust and Auschwitz. This sets impossibly high and gruesome standards for any movement to be recognised as fascist; and despite historians’ frequent warnings that the Nazis represent an extreme example and that Nazism is a special case in so many ways that it needs to be treated separately,13 it is at least subliminally this framing that makes so many writers averse to designating what they are studying as fascism. The question must arise however whether it makes sense to quibble so closely about the precision of definitions; at least politically speaking, if we need to wait for a movement to seize the state, or for a submerged set of fascist ideas to self-confidently emerge as openly fascist, it is too late. What is this invisible line that must be crossed to make a fascism a ‘true’ fascism, to one side of which lies non-fascism and political legitimacy and to the other side of which lies fascism and illegitimacy? And are we not in danger of constructing ideal types and then discovering that almost nothing meets the standards thus constructed, because we have forgotten that the construction was an ideal type?14 11 For example, Roger Griffin, ‘General Introduction’ to Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–12, lists ten major elements of fascism, and the possibility of identifying a “fascist minimum” in terms of a “common mythic core,” following his own argument in Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991). See also Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (1995; repr., London: Vintage, 1996). 12 In this connection see Maurizio Bach and Stefan Breuer, Faschismus als Bewegung und Regime: Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010). 13 See for example Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History vol. 39, no. 2 (2004): 239–254. 14 A number of these questions are raised, though not for South Asia, in Robert O Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2004).

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To set out clearly the progression of the argument here: there is a recognisable continuum from right-wing nationalisms to fascism. The plural ‘fascisms’, though used here, could also be slightly misleading, because fascism is a family of ideas, with common roots and concerns, even as these roots are often unacknowledged or disavowed, because every nationalism is supposed to be based on the uniqueness of the nation it represents or calls into being, even though in the public debates of the times, Europe and Asia, metropolitan and colonial, western and eastern, were not separate except in rhetorical strategy: the Empire, the world, and India were politically connected, written about as such, and could not be seen as distinct. This inability to directly claim international affinities need not, however, be seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead: early origins of ideas or debates can be forgotten and then later rediscovered in a way as to suggest a newness that misleads its own protagonists. Ideas of the natural genius of a ‘folk’ or people, and of the destiny of a particular Volk, mystically described, were common enough in the nineteenth century. Völkisch ideas thus predate the disciplinary formations of what I am here calling a ‘fascist repertoire’. (If this reads at the moment like a teleological account, this is because it leaves out the falling away of ideas and trends, which do not follow the chain.)

1 Fascism as Analytic and as Movement Given the prevalence of right-wing movements that look very like fascist movements in India (which includes the parts of the former British India and the former Princely States that are no longer parts of India) from the early twentieth century to the present day, it seems important, even obvious, to bring India into the analysis of völkisch and fascist ideas and movements. Yet if fascism as an academic field of study can (or thinks it can) do without India, it is more than apparent that by now, both politically and academically, India cannot do without fascism. And if fascism cannot do without the völkisch, this is true in both India and elsewhere in the world. What is required, in the absence of a proper debate on fascism, the Volk and the question of the authentic national voice in the historiography of South Asia, is to listen in on a mostly Eurocentric debate and to restore South Asia’s rightful place in the history of right-wing movements. Given too that the age of the rise of fascism was also an age of internationalism, which was the context for a movement or set of movements that disavowed its or their own internationalist parochialism(s), it is only logical to

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reiterate here that there was not a separate ‘European’ and ‘South Asian’ political sphere of debates: they were inexorably connected.15 The point of this chapter is not to set up a teleology of fascism in general or for South Asia. Indeed, the genealogies of völkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that some völkisch ideas led nowhere, or at least not to fascism; but they were relatively widespread in a world thinking about defining the nature of nationalism (and we now agree at least that fascism is a form of nationalism).16 The idea of the Volk has its origins, of course, in romanticist imaginings of the German nation in an era of European nationalisms. It was anti-rationalist, ethnic, racialised, anti-Semitic, and organicist, and it glorified all things it could claim as ‘Germanic’; the extent of its commitment to paganism, or to religion at all, remains open to debate, and depends on variations and emphases among its followers.17 This glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India, or a connection with sacred soil and sacred space, hardly needed a (later) Nazi affiliation; but it had been a part of the same building blocks of romantic nationalism across the world.18 As for the authentic Hindu or Aryan, past, present and future, groups like the Arya Samaj, social reformers and anti-Muslim campaigners, the Ramakrishna Mission, or the Theosophists and their splinter groups, competed with one another for the right to define this, but did not substantially disagree that there was one.19 The classic text by the founder of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the first version of which was published in 1923, claims the unity of the ‘race’ that is to make up the ‘nation’: he begins by speculating on Orientalist research on the origins of the Aryans, stopping short of claiming the Aryans as

15 See Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment – South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World’, in Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917–1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015), pp. xi–xli. 16 Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 17 Puschner, Die Völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland; Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland. 18 For an analysis of the genesis of concepts of Hindutva, see Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Viking, 2003), in which he addresses the ideas of Swami Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, Aurobindo Ghosh, the revolutionaryturned-mystic, Swami Vivekananda, the godman and founder of the Hindu missionary order, the Ramakrishna Mission, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha. Sharma does not relate his argument to the idea of the Volk, but he might easily have done so. 19 The intermingling of ideas of race, nation and Aryan Hindu in India has been noted before. For a summary of the debate, see Chapter Four.

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altogether indigenous to India, but making the claim that ‘Aryans and Anaryans knitting themselves into a people were born as a nation’ at the time of ‘the glorious reign of Lord Rama as described in the Ramayana’.20 Savarkar, as is well known, rejects the idea of Hinduism, which to him is a ‘spiritual or religious dogma or system’,21 and propagates instead the idea of Hindutva as ‘nationality’, and Arya as ‘race’ (the translations are from ‘rashtra’ for ‘nation’ and ‘jati’ for ‘race’) – and a ‘race’ need not actually be of pure blood, but must ‘feel’ it is one, ‘a jati, a born brotherhood’ that consequently possesses a common ‘sanskriti’, civilisation.22 The outsiders, from whom the nation must be purified, are those with foreign loyalties, Muslims or Christians whose holy lands are elsewhere, in ‘Arabia or Palestine’.23 If we ignore his invocations of Shakespeare and his potted histories of India, with comparative forays into English, French, German or Chinese history, we ignore the international contexts of his intervention (in a pamphlet that was written in jail after being imprisoned for complicity in an assassination that took place in London and an escape attempt in Paris).24 By 1923, other more literate and academicallyminded writers were more explicitly interested in ideas of the Volk; but is it necessary to argue that without explicit references, Savarkar’s intervention does not come from similar concerns? The advantage and problem of tracing a movement in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, is that we can see developments that actors of the time could not see. This warning notwithstanding, we need to read the histories of these times backwards as well as forwards, both as genealogy (with branches of a family tree dying out – analogies prove nothing, as Sigmund Freud once wrote, but they make us feel more at home)25 and as teleology, even if a cautious teleology. As the European debates indicate, the ideas that made for fascism were already around at the end of the nineteenth century; they came together in the conjunctural situation provided by the end of the First World

20 V.D Savarkar, Hindutva (Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003), p. 12; first published as Essentials of Hindutva (1923). 21 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 4. 22 Savarkar, Hindutva, pp. 32–33, 38–39, 84, 89, 116. 23 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 113. 24 See Nirode Barooah, Chatto: the Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 7–28. 25 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, [1917] 1963).

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War, but this coming together was not predictable or inevitable.26 In addition, there needs to be a place for conjunctural or longue durée perspectives that are not entirely actor-centric even in work that takes actor-centric categories seriously – for otherwise we confuse terms for movements and movements for terms, and the term ‘fascist’, as a descriptive as well as normative category, loses its specificity or its usefulness. There are difficulties in these attempts to bridge debates. The connections between fascist ideas and particular Indian nationalist thinkers is an important theme that appears to fall between two more established academic disciplines: of the European study of fascism done predominantly by those who see themselves as ‘Western’ scholars (with some work now being done on eastern Europe); and of the study of major strands of (in particular) Indian nationalism. This scholarship on fascism tends to ignore the extra-European writing for reasons of embarrassment, disciplinary specialisation or (in)competence, or because it is seen as a secondary part of the history of fascist ideas. Many scholars of South Asian history or of intellectual history more generally might also say that this is a question of European ‘influence’ on Indian thinking, in a flat impact–response sense.27 A good starting point, therefore, is from a central question of nationalism anywhere, and also therefore of South Asian nationalisms – the question of finding the ‘authentic’ voice of the ‘nation’, a voice which had to be ‘indigenous’, not ‘foreign’. This chapter therefore studies the borderlands of an Indian engagement with fascism: the idea of the authenticity of the ‘folk’, connecting to organicist ideas of community and nation in the twentieth century whose protagonists recognised affinities with fascism and later Nazism. It hinges on the use of ideas of the ‘indigenous’ or the ‘authentic’. A Savarkarian Hindutva or a Sarkarian Volk would unproblematically have shared certain distinctions with one another, as with the protagonists of a Germanic Volk; but it is important to problematise the assumed linearity of ideas about a Hindu/Indian race or nation, and also to question the directionality of narratives of the travel and

26 Zeev Sternhell, ‘How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology’, in Constellations, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2008), pp. 280–90; David D. Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 35, no. 2 (2000), pp. 185–211; and Kevin Passmore, ‘The Ideological Origins of Fascism before 1914’, in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11–31. 27 For a critique of which see Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On Indian ‘Auseinandersetzungen’ (with Italian Fascism and German Nazism), see Framke, Delhi-Rom-Berlin esp. p. 14.

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absorption of fascist ideas: not from Europe to elsewhere, but multilinear and multilaterally invented. To study this, it is important to place India in the wider context of the world at the time of which we are speaking. The emergence of a fascist imaginary and a fascist set of political organisations in the 1920s and 1930s depended to a large extent on a voluntary co-ordination of ideas, movements, and institutions that saw themselves as belonging to the same family, but adopted the characteristics of a more successful sibling. A number of these ideas, in which race and Volk were operative categories, had existed in earlier versions from the previous century. The longer history of engaging with ideas of race and Volk in India and the world was part of the same history rather than a separate one, dating from the mid to late nineteenth century. And the coalescing of ideological frameworks that were recognisably fascist or Nazi took place in a context whereby the lesser strains in a worldwide framework of thinking clustered around the more successful strains, borrowing and adapting from them and thereby ‘working towards the Nazis’ – as they had worked towards the Italian Fascists before them.28 But this adaptation did not altogether abandon its right to manoeuvre, to select from a fascist repertoire – and later to remould it to create new languages of legitimation. Indeed, nationalism is particularly sensitive to the charge of being merely imitative: if the ‘authentic genius’ of every people must find expression in the ‘nation’, then obviously, an imitative nation is a contradiction in terms. I shall not discuss theories and theorisations of fascism and Nazism in any detail here, nor will I discuss a significant number of direct collaborative ventures between Nazi-leaning and explicitly Nazi institutions and Indian coworkers or interlocutors (this has been done elsewhere).29 I concentrate instead

28 ‘Working towards the Nazis’ is a reference to Ian Kershaw’s idea of ‘working towards the Führer’, in which he says that ordinary Germans, ordinary bureaucrats, and other Nazis anticipated what they thought were the Führer’s wishes, and sought to carry them out, which is what made an ordinarily weak dictatorship function. See Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the Führer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, in Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, no. 2 (July 1993), pp. 103–18. 29 This is argued in more detail in Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a Non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism’, Transcultural Studies, Vol. 2 (Dec. 2014), pp. 8–44. The literature on how Italian Fascism started to resemble German Nazism after the Axis began to form (in particular with regard to anti-Semitism) has been useful in this regard. See for instance M.A. Ledeen, ‘The Evolution of Italian Fascist Antisemitism’, in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 1975), pp. 3–17. I use the term ‘fascist repertoire’ in the manner of Federico Finchelstein’s use of the phrase ‘fascist catalogue of ideas’. See Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred

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on providing close readings of a limited number of texts and contexts to show some of the contours of the basis for Indo-fascist and Indo-Nazi ideological affinities and exchanges, and on the idea of the Volk. I also concentrate a good deal on ideas or ideological tendencies and frameworks, to the neglect of actual movements of (proto-)fascist paramilitary organisations and their political parent bodies, as also the question of fascist aesthetics. Fascist movements are not original, not ideologically consistent, are clearer about who or what they are against than what they are for, and are willing to improvise or to borrow popular (and populist) elements from other movements.30 At the same time, in order for resonances to be resonant, there must be a history of broadly compatible ideas that become the basis of borrowings. An analysis at the level of movements, the mobilisation of the alleged organic nation in the form of paramilitary organisations, must also be carried out without sidestepping the question of fascism. There is a populism at the empty core of fascisms, where the purificatory power of violence, and the identification of the enemy within, operates at an important level beyond ideology.31 It is possible to use a ‘style’ argument and suggest that aspirations to military or paramilitary mobilisation dating back to before the First World War were universal in the India of the 1920s and 1930s, but also partaking of a worldwide tendency, in other words as a ‘fascist repertoire’ rather than as a ‘fascist minimum’.32 The ‘fascist minimum’ argument relies on an agreed-upon set of attributes without which a political movement is not yet, or not quite, fascism, whereas a ‘fascist repertoire’ argument is less concerned with a check-list of elements, all of which have to be present in order for the movement to meet the

in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 6. See Benjamin Zachariah, review of Transatlantic Fascism in Social History, Vol. 36, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 215–6, for an account of why this is useful. 30 Juan J. Linz, ‘Some Notes towards a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Harmondsworth: Pelican, [1976] 1979), pp.13–78, esp. pp. 29–31. 31 ‘They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community’. Robert O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, no. 1 (Mar. 1998), pp. 1–23, quote pp. 4–5. 32 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 58; Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c.1922–1945’, p. 184; Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915–1950’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick University, 2013; and Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung?’, pp. 8–44.

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minimum qualification as properly fascist. Instead, it enables us to see a wider repertoire from which ideologues have the agency to choose. The repertoire tends to include an organicist and primordialist nationalism, a controlling statism that disciplines the members of the organic nation to act as, for, and in, that organic or völkisch nation which must therefore be duly purified and preserved, in the service of which a paramilitarist tendency towards national discipline is invoked; and the coherence of the repertoire is maintained by invoking a sense of continuous crisis and the potential for decay of the organic nation if that discipline and purity is not preserved.33 It has been pointed out that the Indian scholarship on the emergence of a Hindu Right would do well to take seriously the writing of Arthur Rosenberg, who (unconventionally for a socialist at the time) saw fascism as a mass movement of the Right, and not merely as a distortion of bourgeois democracy caused by capitalism in crisis.34 This will prove to be a fruitful intervention. However, we are still looking mainly at the predecessors of the present-day Sangh Parivar, and the movement of ideas must be seen in a wider perspective than that.

2 Volk and Authenticity: The Indigenist Imperative in Comparative Perspective A near-perfect example of these processes can be found in the work of the academic innovator and political ideologue Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who made an attempt to create a whole language of the social sciences based on an ‘indigenous’, Indian set of concepts (Sanskrit-derived and therefore not exactly in contemporaneous use).35 Near-perfect examples are inconvenient precisely because they are so convenient, and are therefore usually exceptional cases; but in Sarkar’s case,

33 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. ix, sees a ‘family resemblance’ in terms of ‘organic nationalism, radical statism and paramilitarism’, between fascism and many tendencies not quite fascist as yet; in other words, he proposes a distinction that does not quite hold. 34 Jairus Banaji, ‘Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme Right Movements in India and Elsewhere’, in Jairus Banaji (ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2013), pp. 215–30. 35 Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s revival is only just beginning: see Satadru Sen, Benoy Kumar Sarkar; Restoring the Nation to the World (Delhi: Routledge, 2015); Manu Goswami, ‘AHR Forum: Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1461–85; and Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 143–60. Of

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he became a spokesman for, and a link figure in, several networks of scholars, ideologues and political activists whose engagements ranged from the conservative to the radical Right. His is the voice, and pen, that links a religious reform movement of middle-class political nationalism in the Ramakrishna Mission and the godman Swami Vivekananda (recalling the idea of a ‘political religion’ that some theorists on fascism have taken as central)36 with the imperialist fantasies of the Greater India Society; and, one might add, he represents the project of a ‘Swadeshi’ intellectualism that sought, in a more sophisticated manner than the present-day Sangh Parivar but inexorably with a similar project, to present, and to perform, a glorious pre-colonial and predominantly ‘Hindu’ past for the Indian nation-state-to-be.37 Benoy Sarkar remains nonetheless a figure whose writings absorbed and incorporated many of the political ideologies of his age, not necessarily always because he was convinced of them, but because these were already legitimate frameworks through which he could communicate in the several languages (French, German, Italian, English, Bengali) in which he wrote, and to the several publics he addressed. If he remained politically convinced of any creed, it was Nazism, to which he remained attached in public until as late as 1942. Benoy Sarkar, who despite his open Nazism somehow seems to get a rather good press from academics working on India (all of whom absolve him of believing any of what he tried so hard to propagate), was not the only Indian with such a versatile academic and public life. A number of itinerant Indian intellectuals spent much of the early twentieth century wandering around the world, engaging variously with the diverse ideological currents of the time: examples of note, leaving aside those who explicitly placed themselves on the Left of the political spectrum, would have to include Sarkar’s fellow swadeshi intellectual Tarak Nath Das, who was by 1913 a US citizen and a spokesman for immigrants from India in North America;38 Har Dayal, Hindu-nationalist-turned-anarchist-

these, only Satadru Sen has succeeded in bringing in something of a critical reading, for in the ambiguous aftermath of the ‘post-colonial’ moment to be ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘transnational’ is apparently to be worthy of celebration in and of itself. 36 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 37 The classic work on the Swadeshi movement remains Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). 38 Hugh Johnstone, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, rev. edn. 2014).

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turned-Hindu-nationalist;39 and Maulvi Muhammad Barkatullah, Tokyo University Hindustani lecturer, Ghadr movement propagandist and unlikely coconspirator of the Bolsheviks.40 We can multiply the examples greatly, especially if we are to include lesser figures to whom the spotlights of history have been less kind. That Benoy Kumar Sarkar was an early enthusiast of Italian fascism who moved gracefully on to Nazism as an enthusiastic supporter of the alleged innovations of Hitler’s Germany, and of various aspects of Nazi politics, should be quite well known by now.41 Sarkar welcomed the elevation of Hitler to power, writing that ‘Hitler is the greatest of Germany’s teachers and inspirers since Fichte’;42 elaborating that What Young Germany needed badly was the moral idealism of a Vivekananda multiplied by the iron strenuousness of a Bismarck. And that has been furnished by Hitler, armed as he is with two among other spiritual slogans, namely, self-sacrifice and fatherland.43

Sarkar saw the Jewish question as a Kulturkampf in the manner of the Catholic confrontation with the Bismarckian state, which he said no one heard of any more today because Bismarck had solved the problem. In a similar manner‚ ‘The Jewish question . . . [will] be liquidated in Nazi Germany in a few years’.44 There is no obvious indication here that Sarkar had anything like the physical liquidation of Jews in mind. The need for Nazi action against Jews was allegedly because of the ‘over-Judaization of the public institutions in Berlin as well as in other cities’, which made it necessary to ‘purge the public institutions of the Jews and ordain for them a legitimate proportion of the services not exceeding the demographic percentage’.45 In earlier times Benoy Sarkar would also have been a logical volunteer for right-wing mobilisational attempts among Indians in Germany and attempts by

39 Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Long, Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal’, in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 4, no. 4 (2013), pp. 574–92; and the biography by Emily Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975). 40 G. Adhikari (ed.), Documents of the Communist Party of India, Vol. 1 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 114–116. 41 Giuseppe Flora, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy: Culture, Politics, and Economic Ideology (Delhi: Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, 1994). 42 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Hitler State: A Landmark in the Political, Economic and Social Remaking of the German People (Calcutta: Insurance and Finance Review, 1933), p. 4. 43 Ibid., p. 13. Vivekananda, the first international godman produced by India, famously presented ‘Hinduism’ to an international audience at the 1893 Congress of Religions in Chicago. 44 Ibid., p. 31. 45 Ibid.

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the German Right to move towards them. Fundamentally sympathetic towards a Germany humiliated and dispossessed of its colonies after the Versailles peace settlement, he stated that Germany would be a hope for the liberation of the colonies of other powers since Germany was now a non-possessor of colonies: It now remains for Germany to speak out and act in the manner in which the Orient expects that a great race bent on the revindication of its claims should act both for its own honour and national self-assertion as well as for opening out new vistas in international relations and world-culture. The infiniteward energism of the ‘Fausts’ of Young Asia as well as their Siegfried-like sadhana (Streben) for freedom will supply the Volksseele of Germania not only with its spiritual nourishment but will also furnish for it a bracing milieu of hopefulness and the perennial springs of creative youth.46

In 1923, the ‘Bavarian extremist leader Hitler’, as British intelligence then referred to him, was attempting to mobilise various maverick intellectuals from Turkey, Egypt and India behind his new party.47 Mussolini’s Italian Fascists initially had more recruits among Indians. But both ideological and organisational Indo-German Nazi connections were formed reasonably early. In 1928 an Indisches Ausschuss or ‘India Institute’ of the parent organisation, the Deutsche Akademie, itself founded in 1925, was established.48 The co-founders of the India Institute were Dr. Karl Haushofer, a specialist in ‘geopolitics’ and one of the popularisers of the theory of ‘Lebensraum’49 so beloved of the National Socialists, and the Bengali nationalist Tarak Nath Das.50 Along with Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Das had been part of the National Council of Education in Bengal which had debated a ‘Swadeshi’ curriculum for an Indian education that would be free from the domination of colonial models of education, but they were also interested in the basis of an ‘authentic’ Indian nationalism. The Deutsche Akademie’s India Institute awarded scholarships to about 100 Indian students between 1929 and 1938. The Institute also became active in pro-

46 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Asia and Eur-America’, in Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays on the Relations between the East and the West (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922), p. 37. 47 L/PJ/ 12/102, 1923, f. 2, India Office Records, British Library, London (hereafter IOR). 48 R51/1–16 & 144, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. 49 The term ‘Lebensraum’, borrowed from a biological idea of habitat, was used to make the claim that the German Volk needed more space for itself and was entitled to expand its territories. 50 This is acknowledged in the official history of the Institute, to be found at Indien-Institut e.V. München [http://www.indien-institut.de/en/chronicle, accessed 20 April 2013]. Note the sudden jump over the Nazi period: nothing is said for the time between 1932 and 1946.

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German propaganda during the Nazi period. It was incorporated into the NSDAP Auslands-Organisation (NSDAP-AO)51 and was instrumental in starting Nazi cells in various firms in Calcutta which were under German control. It also funded German lektors who taught German to Indian students desirous of coming to Germany.52 Among the other Indians closely associated with the Institute in Munich was Ashok Bose, the nephew of the future collaborator with Nazism, Subhas Chandra Bose.53 A stream of Indian students continued to pass through German universities and polytechnics throughout the 1930s, many of whom were to a greater or lesser extent impressed by the Nazis; the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie continued to fund a number of these, and to provide back-up support.54 Tarak Nath Das and Benoy Kumar Sarkar continued to be associated with an extended circle of Nazis in the new Reich, not least through the Deutsche Akademie.55 Some of the students returned to a home university which also had by this time some institutionalised support for National Socialism, such as Benares Hindu University or Aligarh Muslim University, or Calcutta University, where Benoy Kumar Sarkar was the leading light of its German Club.56 To consider Sarkar merely a Nazi is to fail to attribute agency to an extremely creative individual. But to see him merely as an extremely creative individual – even as he became the spokesman for many of his generation, and

51 The NSDAP was the National Socialist German Workers Party. 52 ‘Strictly Secret: An Examination of the Activities of the Auslands Organization of the National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (sic), Part II: In India’, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), file L/PJ/12/505, ff. 80–81, IOR. 53 Publicity materials for the India Institute, Munich, distributed on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2003, do not mention Ashok Bose or Benoy Kumar Sarkar. An earlier version of the Indien-Institut’s website did list their names [http://www.indien-institut.de, accessed 20 May 2010], but this has been replaced by the version cited above. Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 256–7, mentions Ashok Bose’s presence in Munich from 1931 as a student of applied chemistry. Benoy Sarkar was also a regular contributor to Karl Haushofer’s journal, Geopolitik. 54 R51/16, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. Records of students are few and far between, and it is unclear as to whether they were obliterated by the vicissitudes of war or were deliberately destroyed. 55 ‘Akademie zur wissenschaftliche Erforschung und zur Pflege des Deutschtums’, R51/1, rules of the association, 1925, end of file, n.p.g, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. 56 Home Department (Special), files 830A, 1939 and 830(i), 1939, Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay. See also Eugene D’Souza, ‘Nazi Propaganda in India’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 28, no. 5/6 (May–June 2000), pp. 77–90, based on the above two files but lacking a context for them.

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indeed precisely because of that – is to miss the wider points. One strand of thinking in India always wished to hold on to the alleged spiritual core of ‘Indian’ civilisation, to amplify its anti-individualism, and to develop its völkisch elements – without necessarily asserting that Indian civilisation was otherworldly and spiritual.57 The renewal and strengthening of a ‘nation’ otherwise liable to decay ought to come from the ‘folk-element’: this was understood and actively promoted in India. Similarly influential was the organicist idea of a nation, combined with a militarist understanding of mass mobilisation in the period leading up to and after the First World War;58 this fantasy of military prowess drew on emotional responses to British insults about the effeminacy of Indians, and of Bengalis in particular;59 and can be seen in the hypermasculinity of Subhas Chandra Bose’s plagiarism of the design of Mussolini’s uniform, boots and all, for his own use as he strutted around on horseback as the leader of the Bengal Volunteers during the 1928 Calcutta Congress.60 A longer interest in reviving ‘Arya Dharm’ or the ‘Hindu race’, and linking it up with European, and Theosophical, understandings of the Aryan ‘race’ as the most evolved of the historically great races, and of Indian attempts to link up with these discussions as resources of legitimation, played a long-term role in mobilising potential recruits to an Aryanism that the Nazis also mobilised to good effect.61 The Aryanism of the Theosophists was of interest and importance to early Nazi formations in Germany and Austria.62 Benoy Sarkar’s professed need for a return to authenticity, which we might productively read as similar to but militantly separate from Gandhi’s

57 In this connection see Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays, esp. the title essay, ‘The Futurism of Young Asia’, pp. 1–22. 58 Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915–1950’. 59 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Bengal’, in Past & Present, no. 86 (Feb. 1980), pp. 121–48. 60 Pictures of this iconic moment abound; the uniform itself is centrally displayed in a glass case at Netaji Bhavan, Subhas Bose’s former residence in Calcutta, now a museum. 61 See Chapter Four. 62 See for instance Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and Eric Kurlander, ‘The Orientalist Roots of National Socialism? Nazism, Occultism, and South Asian Spirituality, 1919–1945’, in Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T McGetchin (ed), Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 155–69.

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Hind Swaraj,63 thus stood in a long tradition of colonial Indian thinking, and about the pre-existence of worthwhile and at least potentially modern historical examples and institutions in (mostly ancient) India. Sarkar was more original, better read, and thus less prone to using the crudest and most obvious examples for his arguments. He avoided the idea that there was a pure and untouched essence to India, and equally that there was something spiritual and other-worldly about India; but much of the driving force in his writing is an almost post-colonialist insistence that India could provide or had provided the world with great and worthwhile intellectual products. He extended this argument to whatever would hold it, on one occasion reminding readers that Nietzsche, whose idea of the Will to Power he greatly admired, had learned his philosophy from the Manusmriti and his politics from the Arthashastra.64 ‘To the folk-element of all ages in India’ is the dedication for his book The Folk Element in Hindu Culture.65 ‘In the reconstruction of Indian history, modern scholarship has to be devoted more and more to the exposition of the influence that the masses of the country have ever exerted in the making of its civilization’, Benoy Sarkar programmatically declared.66 To understand this folk element, one must have undergone an ‘initiation amongst the folk’.67 He then made a number of points in advance of the main text: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The masses and the folk have contributed to the making of Hindu Culture in all its phases no less than the court and the classes. Secular, material and social interests, as contrasted with the other-worldly and spiritual ideals, have had considerable influence in moulding Hindu life and thought. The caste-system has never been a disintegrating factor in Hindu communal existence, and is most probably a very recent institution. Hinduism is an eclectic and ever-expansive socio-religious system built up through the assimilation of diverse ethnic, natural and spiritual forces during the successive ages of Indian history.

63 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 168–73, makes this point about the Swadeshi context for Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. 64 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Influence of India on Western Civilisation’, in Journal of Race Development, Vol. 9 (1918–1919), pp. 101–2. Originally this was an address given at Columbia University, New York, in April 1918. 65 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Dedication’, The Folk-Element in Hindu Culture: A Contribution to Socio-Religious Studies in Hindu Folk-Institutions (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1917). 66 ‘Preface’, ibid., p. vii. 67 Ibid., p. ix, quoting “Professor R. R. Marrett’s paper ‘Folklore and Psychology’ read before the London Folklore Society”.

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5.

There has ever been an attempt to govern the folk-customs, popular faith, imageworship and public festivals by the transcendental conceptions of the Divinity of Man and the Transitoriness of this World. The folklore of the Hindus is nothing but the adaptation of their metaphysical culture-lore to the instincts and aptitudes of the ‘man in the street’. . . .68

There was, thus, a glorification of a sort of instinctive folk-wisdom that was more authentic than all the cultural sophistication of supposed higher forms – students of various right-wing populisms would find this theme readily recognisable. Culturally, Sarkar further declared, there could be discerned a continuity across Asia of folk forms of religion, which meant that distinctions made between Buddhist, Saiva and Vaisnava did not hold.69 This was more or less a corollary to the ‘Greater India’ arguments made by some of his colleagues, whom he cited approvingly in his books and who likewise cited him approvingly in theirs,70 but whom he did not join organizationally, who argued from the presence of Hindu and Buddhist monuments in South-East Asia that a ‘Greater India’ of a cultural and economic expansionist sort could be discerned in the history of those countries.71 A sort of spiritual Lebensraum thus opened out for Greater India. The connections among the scholars of the ‘Greater India Society’, based in Calcutta, Visva Bharati, Allahabad or Benares Hindu University, should be noted; and for their popularisers, notably the Hindu Mahasabha supporter and publisher-journalist Ramananda Chatterjee, there was a territorially bounded India that was ‘Hindu’ and eternal, but the ‘culture’ of India was entitled to move freely and colonise other parts of the world. The ‘folk-element’ argument solved another problem of inventing a nation: upper-caste Hindu textual or scriptural traditions would yield nothing of the numbers required in a nation-building game. Meanwhile, non-caste Hinduism,

68 Ibid., p. x. 69 Ibid., p. xvi. See also Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Chinese Religion Through Hindu Eyes: A Study in the Tendencies of Asiatic Mentality (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1916), from which he quotes at length in the ‘Preface’ to The Folk Element in Hindu Culture. 70 See Mookerji, Indian Shipping; Radhakamal Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1925); and author’s ‘Preface’ in Sarkar, The Folk Element in Hindu Culture. It should be noted that they do not merely cite each other’s works in a few footnotes: they declare their intellectual debts and allegiances strongly. 71 See Jolita Zabarskaite, ‘“Greater India” in Indian Scholarship and in the Public Domain: Origins of an Expansionist Imagination c. 1890–1921’, Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien 34 (2017), pp. 259–288; Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indic Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, no. 3 (2004), pp. 703–44.

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if appropriated through this idea of folk practices, could provide an idea of the organicist unity of the community that was to become the nation. And the fantasy of mobilising the masses from above without losing control was greatly enabled by the hope of an organic national discipline of the Volk. We should pause here to outline the affinities of ideology or ideas that had longer, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century, pre-fascist histories. It is necessary at least to note their existence. It is also far from obvious in which directions the ideas ‘flowed’: if some Nazi mysticism had ‘Indian’ roots, and ideas of Aryan civilisation or supremacy transcended the barriers of ‘West’ and ‘East’, this was to be expected, as the public arenas of ‘West’ and ‘East’ were not sealed off from one another, nor indeed separated in any way but polemically. And if the exact relationships between völkisch, organicist and fascist ideas are not clear, with eclectic sets of ideas co-existing in the writings of users of Volk as a category (psychoanalysis, biology, race),72 we could say with some certainty that the former sets of ideas were definitely a part of a fascist repertoire, even if they were not only elements of a fascist repertoire. There was a performative authenticity in recreating displays of völkisch energy in public: these were ideas as practices as much as they were ideas turned into practices, as the folk ‘revival’ of Benoy Sarkar’s friend and co-conversationalist Gurusaday Dutt sought to mobilise.73

3 Leading the ‘Folk Element’ But the ‘folk element’ on its own was not exactly to be given autonomy without leadership being exercised strongly on its behalf, and upon it. Benoy Sarkar’s appreciation of the movement of the holy man Ramakrishna and his educated middle-class disciple Vivekananda is worth looking at again in this connection. It might be recalled that Vivekananda’s importance to India was Sarkar’s comparative yardstick for the importance of Hitler to Germany. In a pamphlet derived from a speech and published in 1936,74 Benoy Sarkar’s Ramakrishna is a

72 Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics. 73 Frank Korom, ‘Gurusaday Dutt, Vernacular Nationalism, and the Folk Culture Revival in Colonial Bengal’, in Firoze Mahmud and Sharani Zaman (eds), Folklore in Context (Dhaka: The University Press, 2010), pp. 256–93; Frank Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism as Historical Process in Bengal’, in D. Rohtman-Augustin and M. Pourzqhovic (eds), Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb: Institute of Folklore Research, 1989), pp. 59–83. 74 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Might of Man in the Social Philosophy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda (Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1936), printed at the Commercial Gazette Press by J. Lahiri, 6, Parsi Bagan Lane, Calcutta 2.

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völkisch hero and his Vivekananda is a Germanic romantic. Of the unlettered guru Ramakrishna, Benoy Sarkar wrote: Neither the category ‘world-forces’, nor the category, ‘nationalism’, would have conveyed any meaning to his life. And yet his Kathamrita, ‘the nectar of words’ (1882–86), has turned out to be the most dynamic social philosophy of the age, and this has created for him a position of one of the great ‘remakers’ of mankind.75

Ramakrishna, for Benoy Sarkar, epitomised the ‘folk’; his was a ‘folk-language’, his wisdom was ‘folk-wisdom’, his logic ‘folk-logic’.76 His message of the equality of faiths, of heterogenous roads to freedom, laid deeper foundations for ‘interracial’ harmony. But Ramakrishna was also somewhat akin to Fichte: Fichte’s attitudes are well-known. Writing in 1808 for Young Germany he said: ‘Euch ist das groessere Geschick zuieil (sic) geworden, uberhaupt (sic) das Reich des Geistes und der Vernunft zu begruenden (To you has been assigned the greater destiny, namely, that you have to establish the Empire of the spirit and reason), und die rohe koerperliche Gewalt insgesamt als beherrschendes der Welt zu vernichten (and that you have to annihilate raw physical power as a determinant of the world)’. It is this supremacy of the spirit and reason, and the emancipation of the mind from matter, or rather the mind’s dominion over the world that constitutes the Leitmotif of Ramakrishna’s sayings.77 In this synthesis of the transcendental and the positive he is but a chip of the old Hindu block coming down from the Vedic, and perhaps still earlier times. . .. And it is on the strength of this synthesis, again, that his Narendra, the Vivekananda thundered a Young India into being, the India of economic energism as well as of spiritual creativeness, of material science and technocracy as well as of self-control and social service.78

The ‘moral and spiritual values’ of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda ‘were destined to constitute the living religion of our country, of our masses and classes, during the present century’.79 In those contexts Vivekananda was described as ‘the Carlyle of Young India’ and credited with ‘the gospel of Napoleonic energism and triumphant defiance of the Western chauvinists’.80 Vivekananda was

75 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 1. Sarkar cited himself, referring to his ‘Bengali Positivism in the Sociology of Values’, Calcutta Review (Jan. 1936). 76 Ibid., p. 4. 77 Ibid., p. 9. 78 Ibid., pp. 11–12. Sarkar cited himself again, referring to his Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, 2 vols. (Allahabad: 1914, and 1921, 1926); and The Political Institutions of the Hindus (Leipzig; 1922). 79 Sarkar, The Might of Man, pp. 12–13. Again, citing himself, he says that he had anticipated this more than two decades ago in his Vishwa-Shakti (World Forces) (Calcutta, 1914, first published in the Grihastha, Calcutta, 1913). 80 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 12.

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‘an Avatar of youth-force’, a socialist (but not like Marx, rather a romantic socialist like Saint-Simon), a nationalist and an internationalist, who ‘served to establish the universalistic, cosmopolitan and humane basis of all religious and social values’. He was, ‘like Fichte, the father of the German youth-movement, an exponent of nationalism and socialism’ preaching the ‘gospel . . . of energism, of mastery over the world, over the conditions surrounding life, of human freedom, of individual liberty, of courage trampling down cowardice, of world-conquest’, just as the West was ‘groping in the dark’ for a solution along those lines. Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra ‘had awakened mankind to the need for a more positive, humane and joyous life’s philosophy than that of the New Testament.’ Vivekananda was a ‘pioneer of a revolution’ and ‘the positive and constructive counterpart’ to Nietzsche’s ‘destructive criticism’. The doctrine of ‘energism, moral freedom, individual liberty, and man’s mastery over the circumstances of life’ was promulgated by Immanuel Kant, and later by Robert Browning. The ancients already had the Upanishads and the Gita.81 Oswald Spengler, in his Untergang des Abendlandes, had been interested in the transformation of epochs, in what the Hindus would call Yugantara, in the ‘cultures yet to be’. In so far as Spengler is looking for the ‘new element of inwardness’ such as can sponsor the regeneration of life for the ‘world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we ourselves are entering’, he is echoing the Vivekanandist doctrine of Man-born-to-conquer-Naturism.82

Sarkar’s parallels between Indian and German history are slightly strained – he cites Karl Haushofer in connection with being superior to many, inferior to a few, but not among the last83 – and in his summary of Vivekananda’s message to the Bengali people, Sarkar quotes an 1897 speech ‘seven or eight years before the Bengali “ideas of 1905” take a definite shape’. Vivekananda’s speech in Benoy Sarkar’s summary goes like this: ‘We have to conquer the world’, he declares, ‘That we have to! India must conquer the world and nothing less than that is my ideal. It may be very big, it may astonish many of you, but it is so. We must conquer the world or die. There is no other alternative. The sign of life is expansion; we must go out, expand, show life or degrade, fester and die. There is no other alternative’.84

In this context citing Haushofer begins to make sense. Sarkar celebrates the fact that the Ramakrishna Mission has begun to expand all over the world:

81 Ibid., pp. 15–17. 82 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 83 Ibid., p. 24. Here there is a citation of Karl Haushofer, Jenseits der Grossmächte (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932), p. 489. 84 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 25.

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Britain, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Germany all have editions of Ramakrishna’s and Vivekananda’s works. ‘It is but the six thousand year old Indian tradition of digvijaya, World-conquest, and elevation of the most diverse races and classes to soul-enfranchising ideals and activities that Vivekananda and after him the Swamis of the Ramakrishna Order have been pursuing under modern conditions, thereby exhibiting the virility and strenuousness of Hindu humanism and spirituality’.85

4 Akhand Bharat and ‘Greater India’ We should recall here the invention of an Aryan Volk via Theosophy and neoHinduism (with borrowings from the Orientalists), in order to stress the ambiguities of the appropriation.86 Towards the close of the Second World War, with the ‘Pakistan’ claim endangering the apparently organic unity of ‘India’, the historian Radhakumud Mookerji found himself the spokesman for the protagonists of an undivided India or akhand Bharat as president of the Akhand Bharat Conference at Lucknow University in January 1945. He declared: I must assert once for all on behalf of Hindus, and with all the emphasis that I can command as President of this All India Conference of Hindu leaders, that the homeland of the Hindus through milenniums of their history has been nothing short of the whole of India stretching in its continental expanse from Kashmir to the Cape, from Nanga Parvat and Amarnath to Madura and Bameshwaram and from Dwarka to Puri. The Hindus through the ages have built up the whole of this continent as their sacred, inviolable, and indivisible Mother Country and infused into it their very blood. Since the days of the Rigveda, the earliest work of India and of the world, since the dawn of history, the Aryan Hindus have conquered and civilised this continent and breathed into it their very soul.87

He then makes peculiar use of a well-known terminological argument: the term HINDU is not a religious but a territorial term, and any native of India, according to Persians is a HINDU. Historically, every Muslim is a Hindu, and we may give the quietus to all communal problems on this basis by taking India as the country of one Nation called the Hindus.88

85 Ibid., p. 28. Citations on this point inevitably include himself: The Futurism of Young Asia (Berlin; 1922), as well as P.T. Hoffmann, Der indische und der deutsche Geist von Herder bis zur Romantik (Tuebingen: Laupp, 1915); and Helmut von Glasenapp, Indien in der Dichtung und Forschung des deutschen Ostens (Koenigsburg: Gräfe und Unzer, 1930). 86 See Chapter Four. 87 Radhakumud Mookerji, Akhand Bharat (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, Feb. 1945), pp. 4–5. 88 Ibid., p. 8.

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There follows a geographical argument to add to the terminological one: India has been fashioned by Nature as an indisputable geographical unit marked out from the rest of the world by well-defined boundaries and fixed frontiers about which there can be no doubt or uncertainty.89

Belonging to ‘India’ thus was a matter of Blut und Boden, quite literally: a ‘natural’ geography and sacred ties of blood made India an indivisible whole. In his earlier work, Radhakumud Mookerji – who always warmly thanked Benoy Kumar Sarkar in the acknowledgements and prefaces to his various books – claimed that ‘India’ had always been a unity, and indeed that ancient India already had had a nationalism.90 His Nationalism in Hindu Culture was, unsurprisingly, a Theosophical publication, given that the Theosophical Society played a major role in defining ‘Hinduism’ as a system, a world religion and civilisation, and as ‘Aryan’, and even, through Annie Besant’s Central Hindu College in Benares (the predecessor of Benares Hindu University), prescribed what Hinduism was.91 Aryan Path, the journal of the Theosophical Lodge of India, led by the sometime labour organiser and Parsi Theosophist B.P. Wadia, introduced Kalidas Nag’s article on ‘Greater India’ as recalling Madame Blavatsky’s statement in Isis Unveiled ‘that “India was the Alma-Mater, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity”’.92 Mookerji was a member of the Greater India Society, his early book Indian Shipping having centrally dealt with the importance of ‘greater India’ to mainland India, as had his colleague Romesh Chandra Majumdar’s Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East.93 There seems to have been no contradiction seen

89 Ibid., p. 9. Earlier work, which he cites, includes his own The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources) (1913). Many of these started as articles in Dawn or Modern Review, making for a very erudite exclusivism underpinned by impeccable swadeshi credentials. 90 Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources) (London: Longman’s, Green & Co, 1914); Radhakumud Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1921); and Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn., 1920). 91 See Leah Renold, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Benares Hindu University (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 92 Aryan Path (Jan. 1933), p. 3. 93 R.C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, Vol. 1: Champa (Lahore: Punjab Sanskrit Book Depot, 1927). On the ‘Greater India’ idea, see Kalidas Nag, Greater India: A Study in Indian Internationalism (Calcutta: Greater India Society Bulletin No. 1, November 1926). On differences and arguments within the ‘greater India’ framework, see Jolita Zabarskaite, ‘Greater India and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885–1965’, PhD dissertation, Heidelberg University.

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in asserting an India with a community of blood and within boundaries ‘fashioned by Nature’, and celebrating the spilling out of these boundaries into an Asia that was a ‘Greater India’ in an earlier phase of Indian colonial greatness.

Some Conclusions The Volk, and the organic unity of the nation was, as every ‘nation-builder’ knew, to be created if necessary via eugenic efforts and national disciplinary formations. The alleged honesty of a ‘folk’ religion as the true expression of the people was an attractive solution to the problem of organic unity, but this true expression was always to be interpreted by relevant and capable authorities. Theorists of fascism speak of ‘palingenesis’ or national rebirth in terms of the importance of building the community or nation-to-be, as recovery from or recompense for historic injustice.94 This would apply quite clearly to India. Affinities with fascism generically are quite evident, and this route to fascism was not a matter of imitation, but of a shared set of assumptions and thinking. Of the chaotic and sometimes contradictory and unresolved thoughts represented in the attempts at systematic thinking of even the best intellectuals of the times, we might say that much of this is at best a fascist direction. And indeed, it is possible to choose better examples if one is but searching for unambiguously fascist ones. But the point of this chapter is to show that the concerns, anxieties, themes and assumptions behind many fascist ideas, and even more ideas that were close to fascism, existed in an ‘Indian’ set of public debates that were not, and indeed could not have been, purely ‘Indian’. A process of the unfolding of Annäherungsmöglichkeiten – the possibilities of coming closer together – with European fascisms that we are happier to recognise as fascism did not, therefore, depend entirely on a process of copying ideas, imperfectly or otherwise; or in another formulation, if Indians were not to be merely consumers of ‘modernity’, but also its producers, why does this not apply to fascism as well?95 Perhaps equally importantly, in dealing with a question such as the fascist propensities of a political order, it is necessary to treat genealogy and teleology together, writing history backwards as well as

94 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. ix. 95 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Communities?’, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–13. I am not sure Chatterjee was referring to fascism, but the argument can usefully be transposed to deal with fascism.

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forwards, as I suggested earlier. This is why my choice of presentation of texts and debates in this chapter does not follow a smooth chronological framework; there is not a ‘before and after fascism’ tale to be told in any unproblematic way. As regards fascism, of those who saw the implications of their ideas and their actions, some pulled back. Others did not. A distinctively Indian fascism was and is possible, but is still recognisable as a generic fascism. If we are to understand it as different, we need to understand what it is different from, and therefore we must have comparative parameters. But this is a longer history that is still unfolding.

Conclusions I Such is the hegemony that the nation-state has acquired in everyday political thinking that the adjective pertaining to ‘state’ is almost always rendered as ‘national’. The ‘national’ invokes the legitimacy of popular sovereignty in the service of the state, and yet the ‘national’ is never successful in including all ‘citizens’, either in terms of their loyalty to the national idea, or in terms of an inclusive definition of belonging to a given state. It is, thus, perfectly possible to imagine an exclusionary and at the same time secular democratic state: a state where the right to be a full member, not in a legalistic but in a more substantive sense, requires conformity with a set of values that are often merely implicit. It is equally clear that the exclusionary capacities of the state are strengthened as that state abandons secular and democratic forms of government; and that in many cases the capacity of the state to abandon those forms is enabled by nationalism, which legitimates selected forms of exclusion. Let us end, then, with a set of questions on nationalisms in general, and on India in particular. Can civic belonging (to a state) be established without ‘values’, in a world not of ‘the state’, but of ‘states’ that must distinguish themselves from one another? Can civic belonging be instituted without resort to nationalism? Can civic nationalism be, in effect, a ‘multiculturalism without culture’, to translate the Nehruvian situation into the language of our own times? Can a really existing state operate as the neutral arbiter that respects different values but imposes none itself? And if it can, can it nonetheless avoid treating that absence as itself a value? Again, if it can, can it distinguish itself from other states in a world of ‘nation’-states? In other words, can the relevance of ‘values’, of ‘cultural difference’ be respected without reifying particular notions of ‘culture’, and can states deal with the rights of individuals, not groups (‘tribals’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Hindus’) at the same time as respecting the relevance of the ‘culture’ of these groups, but not treating such ‘culture’ as a determinant of action?1 These are all variations on the theme of the tension between universal and particular that we have known for a long time. The attempt to establish universal or at least apparently unobjectionable values as the basis of belonging to a state, still leaves open the question of the state’s right to impose these values on those who are not necessarily

1 On this subject, see Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism Without Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 52, 131, 162. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-008

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willing to accept them. There are more complicated examples: conservative trends in the Netherlands can identify ‘tolerance’ as a core ‘Dutch’ value, and an alleged openness to homosexuality as an example of the operation of this value that it wishes to uphold, and declare that since ‘Muslims’ (collectively?) are opposed to homosexuality, they do not belong properly to the Dutch state, which will not tolerate intolerance. The fact that a ‘nation’ must have exclusions in its definitions of belonging, and even in its attempts not to define, is thus a reasonably obvious point. Equally importantly, a ‘nation’s’ inclusions are not always consensual. That this is not necessarily merely a definitional problem is also clear. In the north-east of India, for instance, it was the force of arms that sought to impose belonging. In fact, ‘nation-building’, the phrase that is in widespread use from the 1920s, implies that belonging must be taught, by persuasion if possible, and by force if necessary. This is a paradox: the characteristics of true national belonging were not identified clearly by the Indian state, but people were to be punished for not truly belonging. Was ‘developmentalism’ alone the basis of constructing the collectivity that was to ‘belong’, or were there parallel suggestions of participation-based commonality that bound citizens to the state? Participation was in fact continually invoked in the rhetoric of the state, both developmentally, through ‘community development’ schemes, for instance, that appropriate a Gandhian rhetoric to statist purposes (and I have argued elsewhere that the Gandhians are both directorial and authoritarian despite the rhetoric of participation from below),2 and in terms of state rituals (elections, the national anthem, Independence Day and Republic Day parades, etc.). But the invocation of the people and the simultaneous control over them implied that developmental and other forms of ‘participation’ were in fact directed and stage-managed from above, by the state. ‘Civic’ nationalism, as a general rule, accepts the boundedness of the state without identifying this boundedness with a particular cultural identity, ethnicity or ‘confession’ (in the extended sense we have used the term here). It attempts to institute the boundaries of the state with reference to that state’s specificity in terms of place and history – in other words, it has characteristics that are not ‘values’ in any narrow sense. Can we justify and sustain a strong distinction between characteristics and ‘values’? There will be moments of conflict that lead one to question the boundedness of the state; and these can lead to the bringing out of the implicit ethnic/

2 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: a Social and Intellectual History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 4.

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cultural/confessional foundations of belonging to/loyalty to the state. Does a civic nationalism have implicit cultural foundations? Or even implicit anticultural foundations, so that a leaning towards the specificities of ‘culture’ can disqualify those with those specificities from membership of the civic nation (Captain Dreyfus as a Jew, for instance)? Or does the fragility of a civic nationalism without clear definitions slide easily into a question of ‘values’? Do we allow for the irreducible idea of a civic nationalism, the non-confessional idea of the state? Are particular states, in an ideal situation, simply replicas of one another, jurisdictions rather than entities with reified histories, values, cultures, nationalisms? I find this idea appealing; but then there are no justifiable grounds for a state distinguishing between the citizens of its own and those of another state on any other basis than the jurisdiction in which the people concerned find themselves; and border-crossings are not any more transgressive than leaving the street where you live. I find this appealing as well as utopian.

II Nevertheless, nationalisms are not matters of scholarly endorsement or rejection. They are most often tied up with official remembering and official forgetting; it has been pointed out that emperors and princes, and not merely republics, were quick to seize upon the national principle as a way to claim legitimacy.3 More to the point: the separation of the scholarly and the popular is not as clear as may be thought, and rhetoric and style might be the one thing that distinguishes the two versions of understanding nationalism and nations. A somewhat peculiar and instructive example of the dangers of national thinking can be provided by post-Second World War German history and historical remembering, and intimately intertwined with Jewish remembering of the destruction of European Jews by the Nazis. Among other things, the appropriation of the Holocaust as Jewish, and to a Zionist cause, has been made possible by its being remembered at least predominantly as a Jewish tragedy. Other victims are less talked about, and indeed not even recognised in the numbers game that has become shorthand for those events: six million, not nine or eleven; and the human aspect, in its universalistic horror, can be ignored. In the process, there is a danger of a nationalisation of the Holocaust by the state

3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (ed), What is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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of Israel.4 Again, the particularly German guilt at this, and the anti-Nazi education received by all Germans, on both sides of the erstwhile border and thereafter in the ‘new’ Federal Republic, reinforces a sense of Germanness-in-guilt that can paradoxically perpetuate the very nationalism that Germans in particular learn to view with suspicion at a time when many other ‘nationals’ are learning to wave their flags with pride, and the Germans have reclaimed their flags for waving purposes, in large measure via the ‘harmless’ route of football nationalism. This makes it perfectly possible to forget that many states had their nasty nationalisms that were on the verge of fascism, if not actually fascist, and the Germans were simply the ones with the greater success at being fascists – a success that now hides the endeavours of other states and movements to achieve fascism(s). Here, of course, where ‘nation’ is routinely used when ‘state’ is meant – the necessary trick used to invoke the legitimacy of the people’s will – questions of who controlled the state at any given time, when particular ideologies underpinning the state’s activities sought legitimation in the name of the nation, do not get asked, and as a result the principle of collective national responsibility overpowers the question of control of state power. In Germany, the state and the nation are routinely separated in everyday usage;5 but there is also a historical paradox to national remembering (negative national solidarity), state forgetting (after all, the myth of Stunde Null, a completely new start to the postNazi states, has been integral to post-war politics, despite the presence of Nazis in prominent positions in the West German state)6 and nonetheless a legal continuity (compensation to victims is still paid by the German state as taking legal responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi state). There are indications that this is changing in a number of ways: a generation that refuses to be blamed for the deeds of its grandparents or great-grandparents are not as averse to waving the national flag at football games, and can be oblivious to the fact that neo-Nazis are also doing the flag-waving not too far away from them. They are all still in

4 Norman G Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000). I am not in agreement with all the stages of his argument; but a listing of disagreements is not particularly useful for the purposes of this book. 5 In the German language, there seems to be a recognition of the distinction between state and nation, where ‘nationality’ in the bureaucratic sense of the term is rendered as Staatsangehörigkeit – belonging to a state. This potentially clarifying usage does not seem to translate well. 6 See for instance Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany – A Pledge Betrayed (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981).

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the cage of national thinking: a pessimistic Michel Foucault would have taken pride in this example. Here is where, of course, critics would take issue with an overly structural argument: it will and should be pointed out that all nations are not equal, all national ideologies not equivalent, and the national ideal has played different roles at different times. We are back in the space of the standard historian’s problem of not taking for granted a category that was taken seriously by those s/he wishes to study, while at the same time taking it seriously. This brings us back to the old problem that many Marxists and several constructionists agonised over: when is a national movement to be recognised as one? How ‘popular’ is it? What work does it do? And when does it cease to be ‘progressive’? This is the realm of Lenin arguing with Rosa Luxemburg on how to recognise a legitimate national liberation struggle, of Antonio Gramsci characterising a ‘passive revolution’ and identifying it with a propensity to accepting authoritarian regimes. It here becomes a matter of how the enlightened ‘vanguard’ characterises particular national movements. Or in other words, is it merely a bourgeoisie’s search for a principle to unify its markets, or is it a movement with popular participation? We are in trouble here, however, if we are looking for coherence or positive content across class barriers, that is, outside the circles of the elite proponents of a national idea. A matter of external naming (and therefore also justification by recognition) is at issue. Someone has to recognise a collectivity as a ‘nation’, according to some definition or criteria. When this is done, the route to liberation, or statehood, usually both, is legitimated, though of course not necessarily accomplished. This is the general argument; it is easy enough to use most generally acceptable criteria to argue that the entity called ‘India’ is not a ‘nation’, even without being altogether skeptical about the possibility of ‘nations’: and a ‘multinational state’ might be (and was) an appealing alternative for some. The coercive nature of that state might better be demonstrated, then, not by demonstrating the impossibility of an inclusive definition of an ‘Indian’ ‘nation’, but by recounting the histories of Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur or Mizoram, of being Muslim or Dalit, or of being an ‘abducted woman’ by the state’s definition in the aftermath of Partition. The question then arises as to whether a claim to being liberated from oppression by the Indian state must be made as a ‘nation’ of Kashmiris, Nagas, Bodos, (Dalits, women?), etc. (A ‘proper’ Marxist, with many others, would say that not every claim to being a nation is a true one.) It is perhaps not important for historians to act as adjudicators of national claims, although it must be recognised that historians are either wittingly or unwittingly accomplices in various national claims. One need only juxtapose Ernest Renan’s aphorism about the

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necessity of nations to get their history wrong7 with Pierre Nora’s statement that historians today are themselves ‘sites of memory’,8 at least now that we no longer believe in objective truths. The corollary, of course, is that ‘collective memory’ must be endorsed as history to achieve the legitimation it needs. And that ‘collective memory’, when it is ‘national’, has consequences that historians might not wish to facilitate.

III Are we arguing about historians’ ideologies rather than those of the subjects they write about? To some extent we are. We could, perhaps, reduce the complaint of this book to a single sentence: historians’ failure to perceive or admit their own statism leads them to naturalise nationalisms of one or another form, and to normalise the ‘nation-state’, thus legitimising a form of organised violence (the state, definitionally) by a form of mysticism (the ‘nation’), and thereby completing the circular argument (‘the legitimate monopoly of violence’, Weber). Is this, then, the duty to unearth particular kinds of stories as opposed to other ones? Perhaps it is; and this is what internal debates in a field ought to be about – but do we now have a field, a debate or a discipline?

7 Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ [1882], reprinted in Homi K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 2–22; the statement is on p. 11. 8 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24.

Select Bibliography ARCHIVAL SOURCES Bundesarchiv, Berlin Files related to the Deutsche Akademie India Office Records, British Library Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) files PC Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Papers of the Communist Party of India Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay Home Department (Special) files National Archives of India, New Delhi Home Department (Political) files Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi HN Shastri Papers, Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) P. Thakurdas Papers Jawaharlal Nehru Papers West Bengal State Archives, Calcutta Intelligence Bureau files

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS Aryan Path Congress Socialist Economic and Political Weekly Frontline Hindustan Times Modern Review National Herald Science and Culture Statesman Times of India

PRINTED SOURCES Adhikari, G (ed.): Documents of the Communist Party of India, Vol. 1 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, n.d.). Adhikari, G: ‘National Unity Now!’, People’s War, 8 August 1942, reprinted in G Adhikari (ed), Pakistan and National Unity (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, n.d.), p. 6. Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) [1995]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-009

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ONLINE RESOURCES Constituent Assembly of India debates: http://www.goodgovernanceindia.com/pdf/ Constituent-Assembly-Debates.pdf Indian Penal Code: https://indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/2263?view_type=browse& sam_handle=123456789/1362

Index abducted women 180, 229 Afghanistan 38 Africa 37, 61–64, 192 agency 29, 47, 80, 87, 106, 127, 131, 133, 136, 153, 209, 213 Ahmad, Z.A. 176–178 Aligarh Muslim University 213 All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) 184 All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) 144 Allahabad University 216 Ambedkar, B. R. 82–85, 156 ambivalence 69, 94, 109, 112, 114, 143 anarchism, anarchists 74, 79, 86, 139, 210 Andaman Cellular Jail 79 Andamanese 154 Anderson, Benedict 35, 39, 41 anthropology 154–155 anthropometry 154 anti-Semitic 204 Arab League 62 Arabic 71, 105, 108, 109, 121 Archaeological Survey of India 23, 51 Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 193 Arnold, Sir Edwin 142, 143 Arthashastra 215 Arya Samaj 70–71, 143, 145, 153, 156, 204 Aryan Path 145, 221 Aryan, Aryanism 3, 4, 21, 23, 70–73, 98, 115, 125, 133, 137, 139, 140–151, 153, 154, 159, 199, 204–205, 214, 217, 220, 221 ashram 144 Asiatic mode of production 34, 136 Assam 176, 192 audience 1, 12, 14, 50, 55, 70, 81, 90, 93–94, 108, 112, 117, 126–128, 142, 147, 153 Auschwitz 202 Auslands-Organization der NSDAP (NSDAP-AO) 213 authentic, authenticity 8, 11, 36, 39, 40–41, 49, 54, 56, 58–63, 69–73, 93–95, 97, 100, 102–103, 105, 109, 113, 118, 122–23, 130–132, 137, 139, 159, 188, 190, 199, 203–204, 206–207, 209–217 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110659412-010

authoritarian 79, 226, 229 avatars 55, 85, 130, 148, 219 Baba Ramchandra 130 Babri Masjid 19 Backward Castes 84, 86, 87, 132, 157 backwardness 44, 103, 109, 139 Baluchis 175 Bandung Conference 192 Bangladesh 48 banias 114 Barcelona 191 Barkatullah, Maulvi Muhammad 211 Baroda 83 beef, beef-eating 126, 144 Begriffsgeschichte 125 Benares Hindu University 146, 213, 221 Bengal Volunteers 214 Bengali 3, 6, 16, 42, 49, 56, 71, 79, 93–118, 131, 146–148, 176, 201, 210, 212, 214, 219 Besant, Annie 141–143, 145–146, 221 bhadralok 56, 74, 93–97, 100–102, 106, 109, 118, 131, 146, 148 Bhagavad Gita 142–143 bhakti 130 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 21–22 Bharatiyata 129 Bhave, Vinoba 190 Bhoodan 190 Birla, G.D. 146, 186 Bismarck, Otto von 211 Black Shirts 79 Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna 141, 221 Bodos 229 Bolsheviks 2, 68, 211 Bombay Plan of 1944 183 borders 4, 28, 164–165, 173, 177, 192–194, 227–228 Bose, Ashok 213 Bose, Jagadish Chandra 115, 151 Bose, Pramatha Nath (P.N.) 116, 151 Bose, Subhas Chandra 213, 214 Bosnia 57

254

Index

boundaries 2, 10, 16, 25, 28, 42, 46, 66, 124, 161, 163–164, 167, 189, 194–195, 199, 221–222, 226 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 33–34, 52, 55, 58–62, 64, 82, 85, 96, 98, 103, 162, 209, 229 boycott 74, 156, 188 Bradlaugh, Charles 140–141 brahmachari 81 Brahmin, Brahminism 56, 72, 113, 122, 126 Brahmo Samaj 112–114 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 68 British Empire 83, 87 British rule 10, 16, 44, 67, 69, 72, 84, 91, 94, 104–107, 111, 130, 150, 172 Brooks, Ferdinand 145 Brown Shirts 79 Bukhara 105 business, businessmen 60, 66, 68, 78, 81, 87, 114, 117, 170, 182–184, 195–196 Calcutta 73–74, 88, 214, 216 Calcutta University 213 Cambridge University 18, 45, 52, 137, 147, 161, 197 capitalism, capitalists 34, 55, 78–79, 136, 163, 166, 181, 183–186, 188, 209 Carlyle, Thomas 142, 147, 218 caste 3–4, 6, 26, 37, 43, 45, 49, 68, 71–72, 74, 78, 82–87, 105, 111, 114, 125, 129, 132, 134, 144, 154–157, 165, 167, 173, 180–181, 189, 195, 215–216 census 124, 134, 154–156 Central Asia 104–105 Central Hindu College, Benares 146, 221 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 15, 54–55 Chatterjee, Partha 39, 43, 52–53, 97 Chatterjee, Ramananda 216 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 106, 130 Chattopadhyay, Virendranath 24 chemistry, chemists 95, 110, 113, 115, 151 Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi) 191 China 105–106, 172–173, 191–193 Christianity, Christian missionaries, Christian theology 84, 106–108, 111, 137, 140, 144, 156, 159, 172, 188, 205 citizenship 189, 194

civil disobedience 75, 80, 156 civil society 43 civilising mission 44, 94, 117 clash of civilisations 38 class, classes 1, 6, 13, 31–33, 43–45, 47–48, 52, 60–62, 67, 73–74, 77–78, 86, 89, 94, 96, 128, 131, 138, 157, 172–174, 183–184, 186–187, 195–196, 210, 215, 217–218, 220, 229 classical 11, 67, 98, 106, 147, 165 Cold War 14, 87, 182, 190, 196 collaborators 80, 83, 105, 109, 127 collective memory 56, 201, 230 Columbia University 83, 144 Commonwealth 87 Communal Award 84, 156–157 communal, communalism, communalists 2,3,5,15, 17–23, 41–42, 46, 57, 78, 84, 101–102, 152, 155–157, 159, 167, 171, 175–176, 179, 181–182, 215, 220 communists, Communist Party of India (CPI) 18, 21, 34, 46, 52, 62, 77, 79–80, 82, 86, 88, 139, 162, 166, 170, 173–176, 178–179, 182, 184, 186, 190, 197 communitarian, communities 1–3, 8, 16, 26, 35, 41, 43–44, 46, 66, 76, 95, 98, 136–139, 150, 152, 154, 156–157, 174, 180, 189–190, 206, 217, 222, 226 Community Development 190, 226 comparative advantage 67 confederacy 175 Congress Socialist 82 Congress Socialist Party (CSP) 77, 170, 176 Constituent Assembly 180, 187–188 Conway, Moncure Daniel 142 cooperative farming 193 cosmopolitan 19, 27, 29, 67, 219 Cotton, Sir Henry 148 cow-slaughter 181 Cripps, Sir Stafford 191 custom 35, 105, 113, 122, 133–134, 152, 193, 216 Dacca (Dhaka) 74 Dalit 132, 229 Das, Tarak Nath 210, 212–213

Index

Datta, Michael Madhusudhan 111 decolonisation 44, 164 deindustrialisation 67 democracy, democratic 13, 19, 45, 60, 68, 76, 114, 139, 165, 169, 175, 190, 195, 209, 225 dependency theorists 58, 60, 162 desh 98 Deutsche Akademie 212–213 development, developmentalist, developmentalism 4, 13, 42, 57, 62, 64, 67–68, 78, 85, 162–167, 171, 179, 181–183, 187, 189–190, 193–195, 199, 226 dharma 122 dictator 75 disciplined, disciplining 8–10, 12, 32–33, 43, 64, 72, 79, 87, 89, 124, 144, 166, 184–185, 199, 209, 217, 222 Discovery of India, The 64, 171–174 dominance 1, 52, 152 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 141 drain of wealth 67 Dreyfus affair; Dreyfus, Captain Alfred 34, 227 Dutt, Gurusaday 217 Dyer, General Reginald 69 East India Company 105, 136 east, eastern 38, 40, 72, 97, 103, 110–111, 123, 137, 140, 142, 147, 149, 151, 169, 191, 203, 217 economic nationalism, economic nationalist 67, 83, 181 elections, electorate 66, 76–77, 83–84, 156–157, 226 elite 1, 12, 18, 25, 28, 37, 43, 47–48, 52–56, 58, 60, 66–71, 75, 80, 88–89, 94, 105, 128, 130–131, 135, 145–146, 148, 152–153, 164, 167–168, 171–172, 187, 195–196, 201, 229 Enlightenment 34, 49, 59 ethnic, ethnicity 3, 13, 34, 36–37, 90, 101, 163, 167, 204, 215, 226 ethnography 93, 133, 154 eugenics 3, 151, 1153, 173, 199, 222

255

European 1, 3, 10, 16, 18–19, 44, 55–56, 63, 67, 69, 71, 98–100, 104–106, 110, 112–113, 125–126, 129, 134–135, 147–149, 156, 169, 199–200, 204–206, 214, 222, 227 Fanon, Frantz 12, 34, 52, 54, 58–64 Fascist, fascism 5, 19, 23, 34, 48, 50, 52, 54, 79, 148, 158–159, 169–170, 182, 199–223, 228 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 211, 218–219 First World War 2, 30–31, 68, 75, 87, 146, 202, 208, 214 Fitrat, Abdurrauf 104 folk 199, 203, 206, 214–218, 222 Foucault, Michel 48, 229 France 9, 34, 41, 220 Freemasonry 146 Gandhi, Indira 46 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand; Gandhian 41, 75–79, 81–85, 103, 113, 124, 129–132, 136–139, 142–144, 156–157, 159, 161, 165–166, 169–170, 181–182, 185, 188, 190–191, 214, 226 gender 6, 26 genealogy 17, 20–21, 85, 100, 106, 112, 119, 124, 136, 205, 222 generation 22, 45, 105, 125, 145, 213, 228 Germany 2, 9, 34, 67, 75, 142, 211–214, 217–220, 227–228 Ghadr 211 Ghosh, Aurobindo 131, 147 Golwalkar, M.S. 79, 158 Government of India Act, 1935 78, 83, 87, 124 Graeco-Roman 98 gramdan 190 Gramsci, Antonio 47–48, 52, 96, 229 Great Calcutta Killings 88 Great Patriotic War 77 Greater India Society 210, 216, 220–222 Greek 121, 149 Guha, Ranajit 16, 48, 52, 55 Guomindang 139

256

Index

Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey 99, 135 Har Dayal 210 Harijans 85, 124 Harrow 161, 181 Haushofer, Karl 212, 219 Havell, E.B. 149–150 Hegdewar, K.B. 79 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 55 hegemony, hegemonic 10, 26, 48–49, 52, 64, 70, 91, 123, 152–153, 162, 164, 225 Hindi 71, 151, 156, 187 Hindu Code Bill 189 Hindu College (Calcutta) 111–112, 116 Hindu Mahasabha, Hindu Sabha 21, 83, 146, 156, 181, 216 Hinduism 20, 70–71, 74, 83–85, 106, 108–109, 114, 116, 121, 123–126, 128–130, 132–134, 141–143, 145–148, 150–152, 156, 158–159, 172, 205, 215–216, 220–221 Hindustan Socialist Republican Army 82 Hindustani 71, 151, 211 Hindutva 5, 23, 40, 42, 50, 158–159, 200, 205–206 Hirachand, Walchand 117 historiography 3, 19–20, 26–27, 42–44, 46–49, 51, 54, 56, 65–66, 89–91, 95, 101, 107, 116, 152, 200–201, 203 Hitler, Adolf 79, 211–212, 217 Hobsbawm, Eric 35 Holocaust 202, 227 Home Rule League 146 homosexuality 226 House of Commons 66, 136, 140 hybridity 41 hyperreality 55–56 imperialism, imperialist 4,7, 26, 34, 44–47, 49, 52, 54, 66–67, 78–80, 90, 112, 118, 136, 169, 174, 178, 181, 184, 191, 210 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 147 Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) 21–22, 50 Indian National Army (INA) 88 Indian National Congress (INC) 2, 20, 46, 66, 75–78, 83–84, 86, 88, 130, 148, 153,

161, 165, 167, 170–171, 176–178, 180–186, 189, 196–197, 214 Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) 184, 186 indigenous, indigenism 8, 11, 18, 39–41, 49, 54–56, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79–80, 91, 97, 101, 103–105, 109–110, 117–118, 123, 132–133, 137, 142, 144–145, 166–167, 187, 190, 195, 205–206, 209 Indologists, Indology 122, 133, 142 industrialists, industries, industrialisation 2, 67, 79, 116–117, 138, 141–142, 144, 146, 155, 163, 181, 183–186, 191 Inner Line 192 Interim Government 182, 184, 192 Iran 104, 117, 121 Iraq 38 Israel 228 jadid 105 Jallianwalla Bagh 69 Japan 88, 177, 191 jati 1, 98, 102, 129, 134, 205 Jews 50, 132, 159, 188, 211, 227 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 176–177 Jones, Sir William 133, 135, 137 Joshi, P.C. 177–178 Kanpur 185 Kant, Immanuel 55, 219 karma 85 Kashmir 5, 9, 220, 229 khadi 81, 144 Khan, Liaquat Ali 182 Khan, Sir Syed Ahmad 86 Khilafat movement 75 Kipling, Rudyard 73, 93, 118 Kisan Sabhas 77–78 Kripalani, J.B. 81, 182 Krishak Praja Party 78, 175–176 kshatriya 129 Kulturkampf 211 Kumarappa, J.C. 144 labour 6, 60, 166, 184–186, 195–196, 221 Labour Party 117

Index

Lahore Resolution (Pakistan Resolution) 175–176 land reform 163, 189–190 landlords 184 language of legitimation 40, 125, 127, 135, 162, 165–166, 207 League of Nations 3 Lebensraum 212, 216 Lenin, V.I. 2, 229 Leninist 59, 197 liberalism 31–14, 32, 127 Luxemburg, Rosa 229 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 113 Macdonald, Ramsay 117 Mahabharata 173 Maine, Sir Henry Sumner 136–137, 150 Majumdar, Romesh Chandra 221 Malaviya, Madan Mohan 146 Manipur 229 Manusmriti 215 Maoist 48 Marathas 102, 157 Marwaris 114 Marx, Karl 34, 49, 55, 69, 136, 219 Marxism 42, 45–50, 52, 58–59, 85, 103, 118–119, 201, 229 Masani, M.R. 170 masculinity 81, 214 mass mobilisation 12, 25, 36, 75, 79–80, 175, 184, 189, 208, 211, 214, 217 Matthai, John 136–137 Mazzini, Giuseppe 2, 25 metanarratives 26, 44, 65, 83, 89, 95 Metcalfe, Sir Charles 136 Mill, James 107, 113, 135 Mizoram 229 mleccha 193 Mookerji, Radhakumud 116, 137, 220–221 Moonje, B.S. 79 Mueller, Friedrich Max 137–138, 142, 148–149 Mughal 51, 74, 95, 102 Mukerjee, Radhakamal 137 Munich 191, 213 Muslim League 74, 77–78, 86, 88, 174–176, 182

257

Muslims 3–4, 20–21, 24, 37, 43, 45, 50–51, 70–71, 74–75, 78–79, 82, 85–88, 96, 101–102, 105, 107–109, 114–115, 124, 130, 132–133, 135, 140, 145, 150–151, 154, 156, 158, 173–176, 178–182, 187–190, 194, 204–205, 220, 225–226, 229 Mussolini, Benito 75, 79, 212, 214 Mutiny of 1857-58 112 Mysore University 116 Nag, Kalidas 221 Nagaland, Nagas 192–193, 229 Nandy, Ashis 39–40, 131 Naoroji, Dadabhai 66 Narayan, Jayaprakash 170 Narodnik 103, 137 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 192 National Planning Committee 153 National Socialists, Nazis 212–214, 217, 227–228 Nehru, Jawaharlal 24, 46–47, 58, 64, 81, 145, 161–162, 165–174, 176–186, 189, 191–193, 195–197 Nehruvian 19, 40, 43, 45–56, 62, 160–162, 164–167, 171, 189, 192, 194–195, 197, 225 Nicobarese 154 Nietzsche, Friedrich 215, 219 Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble) 115, 146–147, 151 Nkrumah, Kwame 192 Non-Alignment 192 Non-Cooperation 75, 80 Nora, Pierre 230 North America 1, 50, 126, 142, 148, 210 North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) 192 organic intellectuals 8, 96, 131 organicist 3, 27, 35, 58, 204, 206, 208–209, 214, 217, 220, 222 Oriental despotism 34, 136 Outer Line 192 Oxford 137 Pakistan 21, 48, 77, 85, 87–88, 174–175, 177, 179–180, 182, 188, 220 Palestine 9, 205

258

Index

Pan-Africanism 62, 64, 192 Pan-Arabism 62, 192 Pan-Asianism 191–192 panchayat 139 paramilitary 79, 208–209 Parsis 66, 117, 132, 188, 221 Partition of Bengal (1905) 2, 73–74 Partition of India (1947) 4, 176, 179–180, 187, 229 passive revolution 229 Patel, Vallabhbhai 197 Pathans 175 peasants 21, 47–48, 52, 55, 63, 77–78, 82, 86, 88, 129–130, 173, 175, 184 People’s War 175 Persian 108, 111, 127, 220 Peter the Great 103 Pinch, William 129–130 Poona Pact 84, 124, 132, 156–7, 159 Popular Front 77 populism, populist 50, 71, 73, 153, 208, 216 postcolonial; postcolony 29, 42, 49, 51, 54, 124, 201 postmodern 42 Prague 191 Prasad, Rajendra 181, 197 Pre-Raphaelites 141 Presidency College, Calcutta 116 psycho-affective equilibrium 54 Punjabis 175–176 purification, purity 3, 8, 123, 140, 156, 205, 208–209 Quit India Movement 75, 81, 87–88, 176–178 Quran 105 race 3, 36, 61, 66, 71, 79, 114, 125, 128–129, 143, 150–151, 154, 158–159, 169–170, 172–173, 187, 199, 204–207, 212, 214, 217, 220 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 133, 187 Rai, Lajpat 23–24, 70 Rajasthan 114 Rajputs 102 Ramakrishna 131, 146, 217–218, 220 Ramakrishna Mission 147, 204, 210, 219–220

Ramanandi Sampraday 129 Ramayana 173, 205 Ranger, T.O. 35 Rani of Jhansi 147 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 21 Ray, Acharya Prafulla Chandra 110–116, 151 reformation 140, 189 regeneration 136, 219 Renaissance, Bengal/ Indian 108–109, 112–113 Renan, Ernest 229 revivalism, Hindu 19 revolution, revolutionary 2, 24, 48, 59–62, 103, 147, 183–184, 219 romantic anticapitalism 128, 136, 140, 143 Rosenberg, Arthur 209 Roy, Raja Rammohun 108–109, 112–113, 127–128, 135 Royal Indian Navy (RIN) Mutiny 88 Royal Society 93, 118 rural welfare 190 Ruskin, John 141–142 Russia 74, 77, 103–104, 137, 173, 184, 191 sadhu, sadhu-sanyasi 129–133 Sahajananda, Swami 129 Said, Edward W. 48 Saint-Simon, Henri de 219 Saiva 122, 126, 216 sampraday 102, 122, 126, 129 sampradayikata 102 sanatan dharma 85 Sanskrit, Sanskritic, Sanskritisation 98, 106, 122, 129, 134, 138, 156, 209 Saraswati, Swami Dayanand 145–146 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar 116, 209–219, 221 Sarkar, Sir Jadunath 95, 116 Sarkar, Sumit 16, 41, 48 sati 101 satyagraha 80 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 23, 79, 158, 204–206 Scheduled Castes 189 science, scientists 72, 74, 105, 110–111, 113, 115, 118, 141, 151, 154–155, 166, 208, 221 Seal, Brajendranath 151

Index

Second World War 88, 174, 182, 184, 191, 201–202, 220, 227 secular, secularism 5, 18–20, 26, 39–42, 45, 51, 54–55, 57, 62, 66, 75, 140, 152, 161, 189, 215, 225 Shanghai 139 Shastri, Harihar Nath 186 shuddhi 156 Sikhs 102, 140, 156, 179 Simon Commission 23 Sindhis 175 Singh, Bhagat 82 Siraj-ud-Daulah 102 Smedley, Agnes 24 Smith, Vincent 117 social reform 86, 208, 140, 189–190, 204 socialism, socialist 4, 15, 24, 47, 57, 103–104, 110, 138, 162–163, 166, 170–171, 179, 181, 183, 186, 188, 195–196, 209, 219 sovereignty 1, 3, 13, 34, 36, 176, 225 Spanish Civil War 191 Spencer, Herbert 113 Spengler, Oswald 219 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty 48, 52–54 strikes 47, 80, 88, 185–186 subaltern; Subaltern Studies; subalternist 15–16, 18, 47–56, 78, 89, 130, 153, 201 swadeshi 2, 73–75, 86, 116, 147, 151, 210, 212 Tagore, Rabindranath 40, 97, 102, 147, 191 taxation 155, 182 Tebhaga movement 88 technology, technocracy 42, 62, 72, 74, 103, 166, 197, 218 teleology, telos 9, 32, 75, 87, 124, 144, 159, 199, 203–205, 222 terrorism 23, 74, 79, 81–82, 86, 131, 147 Theosophy 71, 115, 126, 142–143, 145–158, 159, 204, 214, 220–221 Thompson, E.P. 31, 47 Thoreau, Henry David 142 Tokyo University 211 Tolstoy, Leo 103, 137, 142

259

tradition 18, 35–36, 40, 57, 70, 72, 75, 80, 82, 95–96, 105–109, 121, 131–132, 134, 140, 142, 150, 167, 173, 188–189, 216, 220 transition 27, 63, 109, 166, 181, 191, 196 transitional object 27 Trautmann, Thomas 133 tribal; tribal areas; tribalism 58–61, 84, 98, 124, 154, 173, 192–193, 195, 225 trusteeship 3, 69, 170, 185 two-nation theory 21, 86, 176 under-developed 59–60, 62 United Front 82, 177 United Nations 3, 69 United States of America (USA) 24, 44 universalism; universality 11, 14, 25, 34, 49–50, 54, 60, 68, 84, 105, 109–110, 118, 159, 219, 225, 227 untouchables 83–85, 124, 156 Upanishads 149, 219 Urdu 3, 71, 151, 156 USSR, Soviet Union 77, 104, 175, 177–178, 184 Utilitarian 107 Vaishnava 122, 126, 130, 216 varna 125, 129, 134 Vedas 146, 149, 220 vegetarianism 142 ventriloquism 168, 172 Versailles, Treaty of 212 village community 136–139 violence 12–13, 19, 33, 58, 74–75, 81, 88, 126, 159, 169, 179–180, 187, 193, 208, 230 – legitimate monopoly of violence 13, 117, 230 Vishnu 130 Visva Bharati 216 Vivekananda, Swami 131–132, 146–147, 210–211, 217–220 Volk, völkisch 51, 79, 158, 199, 203–209, 212, 214, 217–218, 220, 222 Wacha, Dinshaw 66 Wadia, B.P. 145, 221

260

Index

wages 184–185 Wavell, Lord Archibald 87 Weber, Max 44, 230 welfare 163, 184, 190 west, western 10–11, 26, 38–42, 44, 49, 51, 53, 55–56, 60–63, 70, 72, 74, 85, 95, 97, 100, 103, 105, 108–109, 118, 137, 140, 142, 144, 147, 151, 169, 190–191, 203, 206, 217–219 widow remarriage 113 Wilson, Woodrow 2, 68 wives and mothers 80 women 43, 80–82, 87, 97, 145, 169, 180, 229 Wood, Sir Charles 136

workers; working class 31–32, 59, 61, 68, 78, 82, 138, 184–186 World Congress of Religions, Chicago (1893) 146 Yeats, William Butler 146–147 Young Bengal 106 Yugoslavia 37 zamindar 111, 114 Zasulich, Vera 138 Zeitgeist 199 Zionist 227 Zoroastrian 66, 117