Nationalism in India

Texts and Contexts

Debajyoti Biswas, John Charles Ryan, Debajyoti Biswas, John Charles Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032404219
• eBook ISBN: 9781000452822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on nationalism in India and examines the ways in which literary-textual representations intervene in debates regarding Hindu, Muslim and other forms of Indian nationalism.

The book interrogates questions of nationalism and nationhood in relation to literary and cultural texts, historic-linguistic contexts and new developments in queer nationalism and ecological nationalism. It adopts a nation-wide emphasis, including chapters on Northeast India and other regions that have been historically underrepresented in studies of Indian nationalism. Moreover, the volume explores a rich variety of literary works by various writers over the past two centuries that have created, enshrined and contested ideas pivotal to the development of Indian nationalism. Located in a range of disciplines, contributors bring extensive expertise in Indian literature, language and culture to the question of nationalism. The chapters challenge many of the accepted ideas on nationalism and critically examine the politics behind such nationalisms.

Moving beyond an approach to Indian nationalism based exclusively in the historicist-political paradigm, this timely book challenges established ideas in Indian nationalism and critically examines the politics of nationalisms in terms of textual representations. The book will be of interest to researchers working on South Asian studies, including Indian culture, history, literature and politics.

1Introduction

Interdisciplinary perspectives on Indian nationalism

Debajyoti Biswas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181408-1

Every time when the tide of nationalism is presumed to have ebbed out, it rises again with fresh vigour like a phoenix being born with chimerical attributes. Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities has stated, “Almost every year the United Nations admits new members. And many ‘old nations,’ once thought fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub-nationalisms’ within their borders – nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this sub-ness one happy day” (Anderson 2015, 3). The Indian subcontinent is not an exception to this phenomenon as belligerent sub-nationalist forces in India's North-East and North-West continue to aspire to form new nations. Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gained power in 2014, the discourse on nationalism has resurged steadily again in media, politics and academia taking within its yoke, by storm, the entire nation. With a major overhauling of the political, defence, economic and educational structures, the BJP government has attempted to forge a strong nation-state by recasting the cultural artefacts of integrity. While restructuring the prevalent order, the government has been at an ideological cross-road with forces that view such acts as “anti-secular” and “fascist.” In these circumstances, not only has the debate on nationalism gained currency in the political arena, but it has also accrued new meanings and has come to be conflated with mere sloganeering like “Vande Mataram” or “Bharat Mata Ki Jay” (Long Live Mother India) (Noorani 2016, 95). Therefore it is urgent to address this issue from interdisciplinary perspectives to ensure discursive and well-researched stances on what constitutes nation and nationalism in the Indian context.

As early as 1916, the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore perceived nationalism as a “great menace” (Tagore 2015, 100), whereas Ernest Gellner described it as a “powerful monster” (Gellner 1983, 42), Ram Punyani visualised it as “multi-headed hydra” (Punyani 2019, 49) and Homi K. Bhabha, considering its ambivalent nature, pointed out Tom Nairen's coinage “the modern Janus” (Bhabha 1990, 2). Such negative connotations of nationalism imply not only its coercive strength and perpetuity but also the sway it holds over modern nation-states. Today the century-old prophetic words of Tagore need to be reinvestigated in the contemporary political climate to understand why nationalism could be a menace, a hydra-headed monster and an ambivalent phenomenon.

Modern nationalism in Europe originated in the French revolution (Kamenka 1973, 4) that exuded the ideals of “romantic liberalism of the era” advocating “right of self determination, ridding itself of alien control and imperialism, setting up a free national state of its own people” (Hayes 1960, 77). Coeval with this was the industrial revolution, the proliferation of the printing press that helped popularise the vernaculars as literary languages, the rise of middle class and the growth of capitalism in Europe (Kamenka 1973, 7). Ernest Gellner and Liah Greenfeld identify the inception of nation and nationalism in the rupture caused by the onset of industrialisation and modernity that subsumed cultural and political transformations (Greenfeld 2007, 65). Eric J. Hobsbawm associates the modern origin of nation and nationalism with the redrawing of the map of Europe according to the “principle of nationality” (Hobsbawm 1990, 3). According to Earnest Renan, the principles that became the basis for the existence of nationalities in Europe were introduced with the Germanic invasions; however, he also acknowledges that the sense in which we understand nation now is quite modern. Such a discourse produced a “universal standard” for nationalism in Western Europe led by France and Britain, appropriated later by Germany and Italy (Chatterjee 1999a, 1). This universal standard has shaped a normative idea of nationalism based on the “common set of standards” of culture, economy and politics. Plamenatz views this kind of nationalism as liberal because it destroys the old and archaic forms of authority and initiates conditions, based on the standards set by France and Britain, that are conducive for the growth of “science and modern education” as standardised by them (Chatterjee 1999a). It is within this framework that the idea of modern nationalism emerged in India during the colonial rule.

India's engagement with the modern idea of nation has been partially shaped by the discourses on nationalism that were prevalent in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bose 2017, 11; Chatterjee 1999b). The trajectory of discourse on nationalism in India was ontologically circumscribed by the Eurocentric orientation on progress and modernity along with the depredation of Indian industries by the colonial onslaught, on the one hand (Tharoor 2016), and a narrowly conceived idea of religion, language, race and community as a nation, on the other. Adrian Hastings has pointed out that nation in Britain was understood as “a people distinguished from another people; generally by their language, origin, or government” according to the definition given by Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 (Hastings 1997, 14). The ideas of nation and nationalism therefore implied two things in nineteenth-century India: The construction of a cultural past and a political right to self-determination of the nation thus constructed on the basis of that past.

When nationalistic sentiments were rekindled in India by anti-colonial movements, resulting from the oppressive rule and economic exploitation brought about by Britain, a cultural revival (cultural nationalism) took centre stage. The ideals of nationalism, however, appeared ambivalent for educated Indians because, on the one hand, they tried to emulate the European model of nationalism by re-equipping the nation culturally, while, on the other hand, they also tried to retain the distinctiveness of national culture (Chatterjee 1999a, 2). The reclaiming of this cultural past as a national culture was a critical juncture because the narrowly conceived idea of a nation overlooked the assimilative process and stressed racial, religious and communitarian differences. As a result, the reclaiming of the cultural past as a national culture gradually became problematic because it created an environment conducive for communal disharmony between the two major communities living in British India – the Hindus and the Muslims. This discord was sparked by the colonial historiography of India that projected the Ancient India under Hindu kings as the golden period and the Muslim rule in India as a period of decline and deterioration.

The following passage by Elliot, quoted by Partha Chatterjee, reflects the bias of colonial historiography of India:

They will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of our rule…If they would dive into any of the volumes mentioned herein, it would take these young Brutuses and Phocions a very short time to learn, that in the days of that dark period for whose return they sigh, even the bare utterance of their ridiculous fantasies would have been attended, not with silence and contempt, but with severe discipline of molten lead or empalement.

(Chatterjee 1999b, 101)

Lieutenant Governor of North West Province and Oudh, Antony MacDonnell, in one of his speeches to Banaras Municipality in 1895, also purported similar views:

Crossing the Ganges for the first time by Dufferin Bridge, I was stuck with the beauty of the view… and my eye naturally rested on the most prominent objects in the landscape – the graceful minarets of Aurangzeb's mosque and the solid Dufferin Bridge. The thought at once occurred to me that each was typical of an era and of a policy. In the minarets towering over Hindu shrines which were of hoary antiquity before the Prophet began his mission, I saw a symbol of the disdainful and inconsiderate spirit of the late Mughal rule, which imposed restraints on conscience and excluded the larger section of the community from their natural rights.

(Rai 2001, 20)

Since national historiography has always played an important part in the nation-building process, naturally the consciousness of the newly educated Indians under the English curriculum was also shaped by such histories. These early histories of India written by British authors have been highly contested; even the ones written by Indians based on orientalist discourses are accused of historical inaccuracy and misappropriation. Although, Marxist historians criticised such histories and rewrote them later by removing communal and religious bias, nevertheless, it already adversely impacted the Indian national movement. Partha Chatterjee while critiquing “Hindu extremist political rhetoric” states that the ideology of Hindu nationalist thought was shaped by minor Bengali historians such as Bholanath Chakroborty and Taranicharan Chattopadhyay, who were the products of colonial education. Chatterjee points out that one distinctive error in these histories is their argument that “although there may be at times several kingdoms or kings, there is in truth only one realm, which is coextensive with the country and which is symbolised by the capital or the throne. The rajatva, in other words, constitutes the generic sovereignty of the country, whereas the capital or the throne represents the centre of sovereign statehood. Since the country is Bharatvarsa, there can be only one true sovereignty which is coextensive with it represented by a single capital or throne as its centre” (Chatterjee 1992, 130).

The framework of a nationalist history manufactured by the British created a fissure within Indian society. The effect is reflected in the writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and later social reformers and political thinkers in India. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's historical novel Anandamath (1882) is an important cultural document that reflects the socio-political reality of the nineteenth-century Bengali (Chatterji 2005). Bankim uses the eighteenth-century Sanyasi rebellion as a background to invoke the importance of national consciousness through the analogy of nation as mother; however, the novel also expresses strong anti-Muslim sentiments. As political nationalism follows cultural nationalism, the anti-Muslim sentiments played a divisive role in the long run and the Indian National Congress suffered a serious setback because of its association with leaders linked to Arya Samaj and other Hindu organisations (Das 1993, 32). In much the same way, the All India Muslim League, which came into being in 1906 as a political front, also looked into their cultural past, specifically Islamic ties with the Ottoman Empire that hinged on Quranic principles (Das 1993).

When the political front for the participation of the Indians in the governance of India was created, the Hindu-Muslim divide became visible. Gordon Johnson writes:

The roving commissions of enquiry in the 1880s, and the prodigious development of governmental institutions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, introduced a new style of politics. Under pressure from the government in England to become more efficient for imperial purposes, and forced to assume wider responsibilities by change in India itself, the government ushered in a host of new legislative, consultative and administrative procedures. As the government impinged more on Indian society so it brought more Indians into the business of making and implementing policies.

(Johnson 1973, 1)

Under this circumstance, the Indian National Congress was born in province of Bombay on 28 December 1885, becoming the “main vehicle of nationalism in India” that exerted the authority to represent the needs of Indians (Johnson 1973, 5). It should be noted that European society was different from Indian society with respect to religion. In Europe, the religion of the monarch and their ruling subjects was the same in most cases except in the regions ruled by the Ottoman Empire. However in India, there were Muslim kings ruling Hindu subjects and Hindu kings ruling Muslim subjects before the arrival of the British. The question of the representation of the people by the leaders created new complications on religious grounds. Therefore by 1889, it was suggested that there should be proportionate representations based on the religion of the representatives according to the religious demography of the respective provinces (16). This created more complications because various groups felt that they were underrepresented (21). Not only in terms of representation in elected bodies but also the selection of Indians in government offices, especially in civil services, posed similar problems. After the declaration of the results of Provincial Civil Services in Bengal in 1893, the Lieutenant-Governor reported:

At the present time, and probably for many years to come, the immediate effect of recruiting the Subordinate Executive on an exclusively competitive basis will be to debar Muhammadans, natives of Behar and Orissa, from any reasonable chance of obtaining appointments. Not only would this be unfair in itself and contrary to established policy, but it would tend to encourage feelings of race jealousy and antagonism, which have already begun to show themselves, and which might at any time give rise to serious difficulties.

(Johnson 1973, 28)

The report implies that not only were Muslim youths backward in English education, but a sense of deprivation on racial and religious grounds had started cropping up among certain sections of the Indian population. With the “principle of separate electorates which were granted to Muslims by Morley and Minto in 1909,” Indians were further divided on religious lines, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah who was initially associated with Indian National Congress shifted his allegiance formally to the All India Muslim League in 1913 (Jalal 1985, 7).

Ideally the leaders of the national movement in India began their struggle by addressing the concerns of the people irrespective of their religious backgrounds. However, the cultural signifiers used by the leaders or writers naturally came to be oriented by their religious sensibilities as well. Furthermore, the colonial historiography has successfully created a division among Indians by drawing a picture of an ancient India having a glorious past under Hindu rule and a medieval dark age under the dominating Muslim rulers.

Many Indian leaders, during the freedom struggle, appealed for Hindu-Muslim unity as the need of the hour. However, instead of constricting, the gap widened further. One such leader is Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani who stated that Indians, irrespective of their religious affiliation, were not only exploited and subjugated by the British but were also looked down up...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Indian nationalism
• 2 The founder of Hindu nationalism?: The representation of Shivaji in Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel Tara
• 3 Nation-in-translation: Interrogating the ethno-cultural discourse of “nation-ness” in the Bengali novel Anandamath
• 4 Proto-nationalist spectacle on nineteenth-century Bengali stage
• 5 From revolt to rustication: Urdu and the Indian national imagination (1857–1947)
• 6 Divided nations, unified sensibilities: Tales of the woe of the partition of the Indian subcontinent
• 7 The question of language in the mothering of a territory: Understanding conflicts in embodiment of territories in a multilingual space
• 8 Nationalism through the glorification of a precolonial Indian past in the work of Chandamama
• 9 Re-examining nationalism and Hindu religious rhetoric in India: A reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
• 10 Unacceptable citizens: Queer communities and homonationalism in India
• 11 The “queer nation” – moving beyond boundaries?: A study of select South Asian novels
• 12 The expression of ecological nationalism in the lyrical narratives of Bhupen Hazarika
• 13 “This Is Our Homeland. Out With Foreign Infiltrators”: A study of geography, nationalism and ethnicity in Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife
• 14 Reconfiguring Indian nationalism
• Index