the context
Over the past two weeks, we have been chasing ideas of India over the course of its recorded history. Alongside reading travellers’ accounts, we also looked at 'India' through maps. We saw how the cartographic image of India evolved from its representation in the early world maps and marvelled at how the land interior to India—its territorial expanse—and its immediate beyond was mapped. The outcome of this latter project, so massive in scale and dramatic in its enactment, was game changing, we learnt. For it managed to do something to ‘India’ that no other rule prior to the British in the subcontinent succeeded at, or perhaps never even intended to, before: objectify it. Colonial forms of knowledge ‘framed’ India in way that it could be looked at, experimented with, studied, analyzed, engineered, and, most importantly, shared--in the form of books, journals, magazines, newspapers, images, models, museums, and so on.
This element of shareability was critical to what we will focus on this week--nationalism. Because it allowed certain classes of Indians, who, by the latter-19th century, were largely products of the restructured education system put in place by the British, to access colonial forms of knowledge and, fileterd through this, formulate their own ideas of India. These ideas, in the shot span of a few decades, came to question British presence on Indian soil and the legitimacy of colonial rule, ultimately demanding their exit.
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From within this broad array of nationalist currents in India, here we will focus on the following: the religious nationalist, the Gandhian, the Nehruvian, and the communist. Alongside, we will have more two points of interest that cut across this broad and well-known classification of nationalist thought: women in Indian nationalism, and those influential and profound thinkers who do not fit any of the above ideological moulds, like Ambedkar, Periyar, and Tagore.
While reading these celebrated and increasingly polarizing figures of India's anti-colonial nationalism and contemporary politics, it would be useful to bear in mind the constitutive role that colonial forms of knowledge played in their undersdtandings of India, regardless of what brand of nationalism they forwarded. As already noted earlier, through their education in a system that was very differently rationalized and organized than what prevailed by the way of 'traditional' education in India, they were schooled in western modes of thought and knowledge. Thus, for glorying in the nation's civilizational heritage--an imporant concern for the ideology of nationalism in general, and for certain strands of it in particular--Indian nationalists turned to prior Orientalist scholarship. On the other hand, for a handle on the more material dimensions of nationahood--its territorial imagination, its demographic content, its techniques of goverment, its economic organization, its instituional structure, etc., it turned to the massive body of data and information produced by the British colonial state. Thus, as some scholars have pointed out, there is a contracdiction at the heart of Indian nationalist thought: it wanted to overthrow British rule in India for being the rule of foreigners, but their understanding of India itself was indebted, in a variety of ways, to knowledge that the very same foreigners produced.
Both in the context of the unit and the course, this week is a key one. In that, it brings together elements from the journey that we have been on thus far and places them on the historical threshold of the birth of India as an independent nation-state. And this leads us into an enquiry of Indian nationalism. Keeping with the ‘survey’ momentum from the previous week, we will explore the landscape of Indian nationalist thought schematically. Nationalism, like all ‘-isms', harbours multiple approaches to it. Any given field of nationalist thought has multiple ideas about what a nation is and how it should be. They vary according to how one understands the nation’s origins, history, community and people, cultural practices, responsibilities of the state, etc., leading to very different conceptions of the nation.
While the history we learn in school typically presents the story of the Indian independence movement as ultimately a united and heroic overcoming of colonial rule, the fact is that there were multiple and deeply contested imaginations of ‘India’ leading up to and at the moment of its birth. The most obvious and extereme evidence of this plurality is the existence of the country Pakistan itself. But even in the sector of nationalist thought where the idea of India itself was sacrosant, there circulated a range of different ideas of India, both as a civilization and as a (soon to be) independent nation-state. Although one such cluster of nationalist throught ultimatey came to dominate over others and eventually claimed representative leadership of the anti-colonial struggle and post-colonial nation building, this does not mean the rest disappeared from the scene. This we know from our own times, when a competing kind of nationalism that fell by the wayside at the time of Indian independence has, over the last couple of decades, made a stunning return on the national scene.
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Click on the thumbnail to aceess the last part of The Story of India.
preparing for the week
To be able to cover the ambitious ground we have set for ourselves, the class will have to work in small-groups this week. Each group will be assigned to research one of the currents of Indian nationalism mentioned above. This work will culminate in graded presentations, for which an entire week will be set aside. The expectation is that each group will read the assigned articles and consult other resources, meet with the instructor to discuss the theme and the readings, and prepare a substantive powerpoint that will be presented by the group before the rest of the class.
READINGS:
Every small-group will read one or more nationalist thinkers in the original, i.e., stuff that they themselves wrote. The rationale for this is that at a time when misinformation about each of these figures of Indian nationalism and their thoughts abounds, it makes sense to go the original/authentic source ourselves and see what they actually have to say. Thus, the readings comprise a mix of short extracts from larger works, transcripts of speeches, and essays in journals and periodicals authored by the figures we will address. For example, the group on Gandhi will read a chunk of his Hind Swaraj; the group working on religious nationalism will read extracts from Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva and Golwalkar’s We, or Our Nationhood Defined,; those working on Periyar will read his pieces in the periodical, Kudi Arasu. Alongside these ‘primary sources’ the groups will also be assigned supporting material from the popular domain that provide a basic overview of that strand of nationalism from the present standpoint.
Please note that instructors might tweak the themes and readings a bit and/or introduce other thinkers of Indian nationalism, in order to accommodate concerns that might organically emerge from their class lectures and discussions in the section.
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​viewINGS:
There are two kinds of viewing material recommended for this week. One is a documentary—the last episode of our old companion Michael Wood’s 6-part Story of India. Titled “Freedom”, it provides a sweeping overview of Indian nationalism and the anti-colonial freedom movement that led to the birth of the Indian nation-state. As we have done earlier with Wood’s films, we will watch it critically, paying attention to how Wood constructs the narrative of India’s freedom.
The second set of viewing material brings together our continuing interest in 'mapping' India and this week's theme--the landscape of nationalist thought, through images of Bharat Mata that began appearing and circulating in the popular print cultures of the early 20th century. Forged out of the iconic superimposition of the map of the Indian subcontinent and the body of a saree-clad goddess figure, Bharat Mata was the nation's territory personified as a Hindu deity. It was a symbolically potent coming together of colonial science and popular faith. Variations on the Bharat Mata theme appeared all over the place in the world of popular print consumption—from magazines and periodicals to calendars and posters during the heydays of the nationalist movement, and continue to do so into the present. Click on the sliders below to view some imgaes of the Bharat Mata from back in the day to more contemporary times. And while browsing, think about how do you would 'read' these images? What are different elements that compose each image? What do they mean? What effect do they impart on the viewer?
You can these images and more here and here as well.
KEY CONCEPTS:
There are three key concepts for this week's material: (i) nation, (ii) nation-state, and (iii) nationalism. Again, as with the key concepts in the previous week, these ideas are varied and highly contested both in theory and in actual practice. Without going into the nuances, here, we will work with them only to the extent that they help us clarify the week's theme and its purpose within the course.
key concept#1:
nation
As a concept, 'nation' is difficult to define with precision. The word has been put to use in different ways and different words have been used to mean 'nation'. Depending on the context, it has been used interchgeably with "breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe". However, despite this fluid range of meanings, there is one sense of the term that is shared by them all and it derives from the word's Latin root, natio. Natio connotes a community of people connected by birth, blood, or origin, i.e., by an organic connection. Hence, the term 'nation' and its correlates all possess in their meaning the sense of an organic connection between their constituent elements.
While the trace of its Latin root remains, in its contemporary usage, 'nation' mostly refers to a fairly large, impersonal community, formed on the basis of a shared identity that is secured by either a common ethnicity or a language, or religion, or civilizational claims, or even a civic commitment--to a Constitution, for example.
Importantly, for a people to be one nation and not another, it has to articulate some property that is unique to itself, one that is not shared by any other nation. In other words, for a people to think of themselves or to be considered a nation, it not only has to present a unique collective identity, it must also differentiate itself from all other nations on the basis of that unique identity.
If this is the working definition we have of a nation, then what kind of a nation do you think India is? Also, can we think of the word(s) we use in our respective mother-tongues for 'nation'? How conceptually close are they to the English term?
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key concept#2:
nation-state
In the most commonplace usage of the word 'nation' today, we treat it synonymously with 'country'. Thus, inter-national travel means going from one country to another; an inter-national issue is one that involves multiple countries, an so on. When we do this, something interesting happens; land, which is what 'country' primarily refers to, and people, which is what 'nation' has as its main reference--two qualitatively different things--come to stand in for each other. And what allows for this substition but remains concealed in 'nation' and 'country' is a key element that give them their actual meaning in the sense that we use them: the state .
Indeed, in the current poltical ordering of the world, it is the state, in understanding with other states, that defines a country and a nation in terms of their territory and citizenry--two central foundations of every single country/nation actually existing in the world today. If there is any misunderstanding between states in this regard, often violent disputes and conflicts ensue. In other words, when we say 'nation' or 'country' in the contemporay world, what we actually mean is a nation-state--a singular political entity founded on a supposedly unque relationship between peoplehood, territory, and government.
key concept#3:
nationalism
It will not be an exaggeration to state that nationalism is one of the most powerful ideas to have emerged in the modern world and, from what we are witnessing in the world around us in the present, its power shows no sign of receding. Without nationalism, there would be no consciousness among people that they constitute a nation. And no nation-state could come into being, or remain in existence as such, without nationalism. For example, not only were our freedom fighters moved to undertake their struggles by the spirit of nationalism, we, as citizens of the country that resulted from those struggles, are systematically taught the virtues of nationalism in our schools, families, movies and other media. We witness its expressions, often violent, everyday.
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What, then, does nationalism mean? According to political theorist, Anthony D. Smith, nationalism is “[a]n ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity, and identity for a population which some of its members deem to constitute and actual and potential nation.”
As a movement for attaining nationhood, nationalism is usually made up of the following essential ingredients: (i) an oppressor/ruling nation from whose clutches the oppressed/subject nation demands freedom and autonomy; (ii) claim over a territory as the rightful homeland of the nation for whom nationhood is sought and across which its sovereignty--laws, currency, free movement of the nation's citizens, etc.--will prevail; (iii) an “imagined community” or a collective of people who, despite being strangers to each other, 'imagine' that they, together and voluntarily, make a community of citizens; (iv) a coherent ideology that presents a plausible imagination of the ‘new’ nation-state, a program to achieve it, and then maintain it; and (v) emotional/ psychological appeal to people to buy into its vision. Importantly, all these elements have to align in a certain constellation for nationalist thought to emerge and sustain as a coherent nationalist movement, regardless of whether it is ultimately successful in achieving its end ot not. If these are the key elements that generally constitute nationalism that is geared towards securing nationhood for a people, then what you think does the nationalism that maintains nationhood once it has been secured look like?
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While the idea of nationalism can be broadly understood along the lines suggested by Anthony Smith above, it has many different species and sub-species. There are ethnic nationalisms, linguistic nationalisms, religious nationalisms, civic/liberal nationalisms, romantic nationalisms, diasporic/long distance nationalisms, sub-nationalisms, nationalisms that are a mix of two or more of the aforementioned kinds, and so on. Some of these types of nationalism can be narrowly exclusionary, while others work with a more capacious idea of nation. Given this spread, which form(s) of nationalism do you think is dominant in contemporary India?
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SOME TAKEAWAYS & QUESTIONS
There we many contending and competing ideas of India that were all a part of the nationalist movement. This ideological diversity notwithstanding, each of these different body of ideas, bar none, built upon colonial forms of knowledge in their understanding of India—its history and geography, and its peoples.
However, depending on their ideological bent, each body of ideas came to often starkly different conclusions regarding what independent India should be like over issues like: the
country’s civilizational and cultural foundations, who the country should first and foremost belong to, its model of governance, development and people's empowerment, etc.
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While the Nehruvian idea of India can be said to have ‘won’ when India gained independence from British rule and in its immediate aftermath, the other ideas of India continued to exert various degrees of influence over the national imagination, both politically and socially.
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Can you think of some ideas of India that failed to secure popular dominance at the time of independence but have since emerged as powerful ideological forces, especially in contemporary India?