Table Of ContentSUGATA BOSE
THE NATION AS MOTHER and Other Visions
of Nationhood
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
Introduction: Nationalism in India, 1917–2017
The Nation as Mother
Nation, Reason and Religion: India’s Independence in International Perspective
Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s Historical Experience in
Comparative Perspective
The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: A Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought
Different Universalisms, Colourful Cosmopolitanisms: The Global Imagination of the Colonized
Unity or Partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Stand, 1945–48
Why Jinnah Matters
Track Record of India’s Democracy
Limits of Liberalism
Our National Anthem
SPEECHES IN THE LOK SABHA
The True Meaning of Bharatavarsha
Fiscal Federalism
The India–Bangladesh Border
Against Intolerance, towards Cultural Intimacy
Free Our Universities, Free Our Students
Kashmir: Crucible of Conflict, Cradle of Peace
Footnotes
Nation, Reason and Religion: India’s Independence in International Perspective
Unity or Partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Stand, 1945–48
Track Record of India’s Democracy
Limits of Liberalism
Illustrations
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Also by the Author
Books
His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle
against Empire
Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947
Tagore: The World Voyager
South Asia and World Capitalism
Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital in the New Cambridge History of
India series
Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India
Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India
(joint editor with Ayesha Jalal)
Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (joint author with
Ayesha Jalal)
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Collected Works (joint editor with Sisir Kumar
Bose)
A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
Rabindranath Tagore, Purabi: The East in Its Feminine Gender (translated
by Charu C. Chowdhuri, joint editor with Krishna Bose)
Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of
Ideas (joint editor with Kris Manjapra)
Documentary Films
Rebels against the Raj
Mandir, Masjid, Mandal and Marx
Netaji and India’s Freedom
Recordings on CDs of Music and Translations of Poems and Songs
Amaar Rabindranath (My Tagore)
Visva Yatri Rabindranath (Tagore, the World Voyager, with Pramita Mallick)
For students who value freedom
Introduction
Nationalism in India, 1917–2017
I
n 1917 Rabindranath Tagore’s little book titled Nationalism was published
by the Macmillan Company, New York. It consisted of three chapters,
‘Nationalism in the West’, ‘Nationalism in Japan’ and ‘Nationalism in India’.
The first was based on a series of lectures delivered in the fall and winter of
1916–17 during the poet’s travels in the United States of America. The
second drew on two lectures given in Japan in June and July 1916. The final
chapter on his own country was composed in the United States late in 1916.
Towards the end of this chapter Tagore recorded his conviction that ‘my
countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which
teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity’.1
When I gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture in Cambridge on the occasion of
the fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence in 1997 on ‘Nation, Reason
and Religion’, I ended with a few lines from the poem ‘The Sunset of the
Century’ that Tagore had included as a conclusion to his book. I found myself
seeking solace in those lines once more in a speech I gave in Parliament as I
defended university students being branded as anti-national and charged with
sedition in 2016. Seventy years after freedom the substance of Tagore’s
hundred-year-old critique of nationalism is more salient than ever before.
‘Nationalism is a great menace,’ Tagore had proclaimed. If Marx had once
described religion as the opiate of the people, Tagore regarded ‘the idea of
the Nation’ as ‘one of the most powerful anesthetics that man has invented’.2
Yet Tagore’s views on British rule in India might be termed nationalistic.
‘The newspapers of England,’ he complained, ‘in whose columns London
street accidents are recorded with some decency of pathos, need but take the
scantiest notice of calamities happening in India over areas of land
sometimes larger than the British Isles.’ In cataloguing the adverse economic
consequences of colonial rule, he was not that different from Dadabhai
Naoroji or Romesh Dutt. ‘It must be remembered,’ he insisted, ‘that at the
beginning of the British rule in India our industries were suppressed and
since then we have not met with any real help or encouragement to enable us
to make a stand against the monster commercial organizations of the world.
The nations have decreed that we must remain purely an agricultural people,
even forgetting the use of arms for all time to come.’3
‘I do not for a moment suggest,’ Tagore wrote, ‘that Japan should be
unmindful of acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should
never be allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation.’ He saw the
war raging in Europe as ‘the war of retribution’. ‘Men, the fairest creations
of God,’ he lamented, ‘came out of the National manufactory in huge numbers
as war-making and money-making puppets, ludicrously vain of their pitiful
perfection of mechanism.’ It was the mechanical organization of the nation
form that posed a danger to humanity. He bemoaned the spectacle of ‘nations
fearing each other like the prowling beasts of the night-time; shutting their
doors of hospitality’. In India before the age of the nation-states the texture of
governments was ‘loosely woven, leaving big gaps through which our own
life sent its threads and imposed its designs’.4
There were weaknesses in Tagore’s analysis of Indian society in the time
of ‘no nation’. His criticism of caste appears tepid at best from the vantage
point of 2017. ‘In her caste regulations,’ Tagore commented, ‘India
recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life.’5 But it
was his thoroughgoing critique of nationalism that initially caused some
concern among his Indian contemporaries. Having read excerpts in the
Modern Review from Tagore’s speeches in America, Deshbandhu
Chittaranjan Das wondered in April 1917 whether ‘Rabindranath of the
swadeshi days who made the passionate pleas to God to bless the soil and
water of Bengal has been turned into Sir Rabindranath now’. However, the
Tagorean critique was absorbed by figures like Das and Bipin Chandra Pal
in the years that followed, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of both
the oppressive and liberating aspects of nationalism. Das insisted that Indian
anti-colonial nationalism was not the same as the belligerent nationalisms of
France or Germany. An intellectual effort was undertaken to ensure that a
generous conception of nationalism underpinning India’s freedom struggle
was compatible with the spirit of universal humanism. As Pal put it in his
1917 essay titled ‘Federalism: The New Need’, ‘Narayana, or humanity is
the whole, the different nations of the world are parts of that whole.’6
Even more important was the articulation of variations on the theme of the
federal unity of India that respectfully accommodated the myriad internal
differences of language, region and religion. Fully elaborated in my essay on
Aurobindo in this book, this was a general characteristic of the most
sophisticated political thought in India during the early decades of the
twentieth century. Sidelined at the moment of inheritance of the unitary
sovereignty and centralized structure of the British Raj in 1947, the federal
idea has acquired renewed urgency in 2017 as an alternative to religious
majoritarianism. My essays in this volume owe an intellectual debt to a range
of political and economic thinkers of the early twentieth century whose
contributions have been overlooked in sterile debates on Gandhian localism
and Nehruvian centralism.
Taking Tagore’s critique of nationalism as its point of departure, this book
of interconnected and inter-referential essays examines the relationship
between nation, reason and religion in Indian political thought and practice.
It does so through historical analyses of the legacy of precolonial
patriotisms, rational and religious reforms, colonial modernity and anti-
colonial nationalisms, visions of nationhood and forms of state power,
colonial and national development, famine and partition, and postcolonial
nationalisms both for and against the state.
A conceptual and comparative perspective is brought to bear on the
history of nationalism in India. The book offers a subtle interpretation of the
evocation of the nation as mother and examines the ways in which national
identity has been imagined in relation to gender, class, language, region and
religion. By adopting a theoretically informed and historically grounded
approach, this book seeks to shed light on contemporary debates about
nationalism and anti-nationalism. The historical experience of India is placed
in a global context.
