This last unit of UI1 returns to the question we began our journey of understanding India with: ‘What is India?’. But here, through three substantial themes, we will approach the question with much greater historical depth than we did at the start.

 

The course commenced with a unit on what we understand India to be, what ‘India’ means to us, from our present location. In this unit, we will instead take a look at what India meant to people who came before us—ideas of India that have existed and changed, often dramatically, over the stretch of recorded history. This, importantly, includes those ideas of India that began clustering around the late-19th century, with the beginning of the nationalist movement that turned into a freedom struggle a few decades down the line. These ideas of India had convergences as well as fundamental divergences in their understanding of India’s past, its ‘borders’, people, culture, and society. And, as the 20th century unfolded, they competed in the political arena of anti-colonial nationalism—with tragic violence, sometimes—to gain an upper-hand in imagining an independent India and how it should be governed.

 

One particular idea of India managed to do this and led it to its ‘tryst with destiny’ on the midnight of August 15, 1947. But that did not mean the other ideas of India that lay claim to its future and the past died out as a result. In fact, one idea led to the formation of another new country—Pakistan. The others lurked, seeking a favorable political climate to stir to life. As we well know from the times we are living through, one particular idea of India from this mix has made a telling comeback in defining Indian culture, politics, and society in the present.

 

However, none of these ideas of India—collectively referred to as ‘nationalist thought’—would have taken the shape that they did without the revolutionary changes in knowing India, in treating ‘India’ as an object of enquiry, rung in by British colonialism. The British brought with them as well as devised while in India ways of knowing about its past, its landscape, and its peoples that was unprecedented in history. In fact, it was the British that systematically researched and compiled other knowledge systems that existed in India before they arrived on the scene. And it was largely through such colonial sources, through the educational system that the British had set up in the colony, that our nationalist leaders formed their own ideas of India.

 

While notionally India became an independent nation-state that fateful day in August, seventy-five years ago, the fact remains that significant parts of the land, both at the geographical center of the subcontinent as well as the regions abutting Pakistan and Burma, were not under the control of the newly constituted government of the country, legally. They belonged to princely states that had refused to sign the instruments of accession with India and were still hedging their bets on whether to join Pakistan or remain independent. This presented a geopolitical problem to the Government of India, which it proceeded to ‘solve’ using massive force and hard bargaining. Some of the long surviving challenges to India’s sovereignty from within its proclaimed territory in the present have their roots in these violent histories of India’s political integration.

 

Thus, to put it briefly, in this final leg of understanding the many pasts of India’s present, we will address three themes: First, we will try and comprehend the transformation that colonialism wrought in what one knew about India and how. We will do this by exploring two key schools of thought that emerged in attempts by colonial actors to understand India, namely, Orientalism and Utilitarianism. Alongside this we will look at some key instruments used by the colonial state to quantify and define India and Indians. We will pay particular attention to cartography and the Census in the context of the spread of other technologies such as printing and the railways.

 

Second, we will explore the Indian responses to the colonial intervention, particularly paying attention to their relationship with colonial forms of knowledge. We will do this by (i) focusing on the images of Bharat Mata and the Indian map as they emerged as key symbols of nationalist mobilisation (II) surveying the competing ideological formations in Indian nationalism and the freedom movement. 

Lastly, we will return to the Constitution, focusing on the historical process of its making. The drafting of the constitution could be viewed as a culmination of the anti-colonial struggle and the provision of a legal framework for independent India. However, the need for the first amendment almost immediately after its adoption, and the tensions it brought to the fore, highlight the different imaginations of India that were often at loggerheads and were continuously reconfigured at different historical junctures.  

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The purpose of this unit, then, is to cultivate in ourselves a historical sensibility that can account for the ideas, events, and processes that, in contestation with each other, not only gave birth to India—the modern, sovereign nation-state—more than seventy-five years ago, but also continue to inform our collective present.