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NATIONALISM AND POVERTY : DISCOURSES OF
DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY INDIA
Sumit Sarkar, Delhi University
I.
Our conference theme --- From Developmental to Cultural Nationalism -provides a helpful entry-point to a range of themes of both contemporary and historical
relevance. In India, notably, the formulation can serve as a convenient shorthand for the
widespread perception of a major shift from around the mid-1980s away from the
‘Nehruvian’ model of independent industrial development through significant public
sector inputs, a measure of planning, and a non-aligned foreign policy. The transition ,
couched in the jargon of `structural adjustment ‘, `liberalization’ , and `globalization’ ,
and involving massive concessions to multi-nationals and a pro-U.S tilt in foreign policy,
has gone along with an increasingly aggressive emphasis on `Hindu’ cultural-religious
identity. Both processes have been vastly accelerated under the present Right-wing
Hindu-nationalist regime dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In broader historical perspective , too, the conference framework should help
to focus attention on distinctions within what, particularly in non-First World contexts,
quite often becomes an excessively homogeneised or unitary conception of `nationalism
‘ . In a recent important study, Chetan Bhatt has drawn attention to the absence as yet of
a “ suitable register within which to locate ….. nationalisms under the conditions of
colonial and imperial domination --- in significant contrast to the well-established
historical distinctions made with regard to nineteenth-century Europe between “ varieties
of primordialist, ethnic , republican and civic nationalism . “ 1
Paradoxically , the homogeneisations sometimes enter precisely through the
quest for difference characteristic of today’s postcolonial moods , in which frameworks
that claim to be universalist , whether liberal or Marxist, are sought to be exposed , often
with considerable validity , as ineffably Eurocentric . But then the single standard for
evaluating non-Western nationalisms in effect remains the degree of their autonomy, or
otherwise , from Western `Enlightenment rationality’ : the more `internal’ implications
for the lives and values of peoples in the colonized countries might get somewhat
neglected. What is being unwittingly reproduced in such theories are assumptions
characteristic of peak moments of anti-colonial movements , when leading groups had
often tried to play down all kinds of internal divisions , of class, caste, ethnicity ,
religion, or gender, in the quest for total unity against foreign rule and / or a pure,
authentic , indigenous culture .
Such tendencies can be seen to be implicitly present even in modes of
thinking about colonial / postcolonial nationalism that do try to distinguish between its
different modes : most commonly, through some variant of a political / cultural divide.
1
Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism : Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths ( Oxford /New York : Berg,
2001 ) , p. 7.
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The distinction here becomes the extent of participation in political movements seeking
to modify or remove foreign rule, as contrasted to immersion in socio-cultural or
religious reform or revival . In his very influential studies of nationalism, Partha
Chatterjee , for instance, began with a powerful critique of the unilinearism lingering
behind explanations of nationalism in terms of linkages with ‘ industrial society ‘
(Gellner), or `print-capitalism ‘ combined with the spread of some `modular’ forms (
Benedict Anderson ). In the developed version of his alternative model , Chatterjee went
on to distinguish between various kinds of colonial nationalisms , in terms of a home /
world divide that broadly corresponded to the familiar political / cultural . The criteria
for evaluation remained the degrees of autonomy of origin . 2 In ways totally unintended
by the author, such formulations can acquire troubling resonances in today’s India, where
Hindutva discourses try to make lack of authenticity, alien beginnings, the cardinal sin of
Muslims , Christians , secularists, feminists , all groups, institutions or ideals they seek to
dominate or destroy .
The `developmental ‘ / `cultural’ distinction is recognizably similar to
Chatterjee’s political/ cultural , but with the values inverted . The Statement implies
some preference for the `developmental’ over the `cultural’ , a `bias’ which I for one
largely share. But inversion can conceal unrecognized continuities and problems, and I
do feel that the terms being used here require some unpacking , to avoid the dangers of
implying an over –sharp dichotomy and assuming teleologies of continuity for both
strands . `Developmental ‘ programmes of course need to have `cultural’ dimensions : in
the Nehruvian case, discourses of modernity , scientific rationality , a basically
bureaucratic-technocratic thrust trying to operate in uneasy tandem with populist `socialistic’ impulses . And even narrow forms of `cultural’ nationalism ( like Hindutva
today ) cannot do without some notions of development , now structured around hopes
of foreign investment , collaboration, wholesale privatisation through selling-off large
chunks of the once-powerful public sector. It is the precise, and varied , meanings of
`development’ and `culture’ that clearly demand scrutiny, along with the shifting
proportions of their combinations in different ideological-political formations , the
confrontations and part-accomodations across diverse traditions.
The commonest form of distinction attempted today with regard to South Asian
nationalisms , quite understandably , is of course secular/ communal . Some clarification
of terms may be needed here, for both words have taken on specific, not to say peculiar
usages in India ---- and acquired certain associations relevant for my argument . `Secular’
, from around the 1920s onwards, has been in South Asia basically the other of
`communal’ , and not necessarily or primarily anti-, or non-religious , or particularly
2
This was Chatterjee’s now very well-known `world’ - `home’ disjunction. Asian and African
nationalists struggling for political rights, representation, ultimately independent nation-states ,
unwittingly surrendered to Western values and institutions, but there was a simultaneous and laudable
effort to preserve and extend autonomy and authentic indigenous qualities of life within the `home’ , in the
realms of family relations . religion, and literature. What some of the implications of such `authenticity ‘ (
whether actual, or much more often, invented with considerable colonial inputs) could be in terms of ,
particularly, women or subordinated class or caste groups were occasionally mentioned, but remained
somewhat marginal to the analysis . Partha Chattejee , Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World : A
Derivative Discourse ? ( Delhi : OUP, 1986 ) , and , particularly, Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments : Colonial and Postcolonial Histories ( Ibid, 1994), Chapters 1, 6-7.
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`rationalist’ or `modernist’ in overall values 3 The deeply religious Gandhi could
therefore come to be recognized as Indian secularism’s greatest martyr . This usage ,
simultaneously restricting and expanding Western meanings, has been a source of
strength for secularism in India, but also made it open to easy association with stresses
on national unity as a homogeneising value, appropriations for purposes of consolidation
of nation-states . It is noteworthy that the commonest charge made by many secular
nationalists against communalism has been its `divisive’ role , and , in the era of anticolonial struggle, its general aloofness and sometimes tacit alliance with the foreign
rulers ---- criticisms polemically useful ,valid enough historically, but not , I think ,
anywhere near exhaustive . And those branded by them as `communalists ‘ of course
refuse to name themselves as such , and insist they alone are the `true’ nationalists
, fighting for `Hindu Rashtra ‘[ Nation } or a pure Muslim state --- while secularists for
them are denationalized Westernizers .
In many different ways , then , analysis of the forms or varieties of Third
World nationalisms slips back into a single colonial / anti-colonial mould , which
repeatedly becomes the basic standard of evaluation . I would like to argue that here we
reach a second, deeper level of homogeneisation , through which the entire history of a
country or people gets folded back and interpreted in terms of a single binary opposition .
And , once again , a contrast emerges between the recognized complex multiplicities of
Western histories , and a tacitly implied uniformity or tunnel vision for the non-Western
. Nationalism is no doubt a key building-block since the nineteenth century in historywriting about the First World, but it is seldom assumed any longer to be the only
possible narrative frame . Yet, whether in praise or denunciation, nationalism, or more
precisely the colonial /anti-colonial binary, is far too often accepted as the central, allembracing problematic , the crucial standard of evaluation, for virtually all histories of
the colonial world. 4 I feel that this can produce dangerous simplifications , and , indeed,
sometimes hinder deeper understanding of nationalisms themselves.
Perhaps we might be able to get a better purchase on our seminar theme by
bringing notions of development and culture into juxtaposition with the problematic of
poverty . This might enable a rough , working distinction between two broad patterns of
nationalist thought and praxis in late-colonial and postcolonial South Asia , qualified by
numerous overlaps , interpenetrations, and changes within both strands across time.
Spurred on by a context of repeated famines and increasing awareness of the gap between
the prosperity and advance of Britain and the misery and backwardness of its biggest
colony, nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals turning towards self-conscious
3
`Communal’ , correspondingly , has had an entirely negative and pejorative meaning for Indian
secularists , entirely bereft of the positive associations the word has sometimes enjoyed in the West ( its
nearness to `community ‘, `commune’ , or `communism ‘, for instance ). It has meant an insistence on
religious-community divides in an extreme, hardened , inevitably violent and aggressive forms , where the
conflict with a similarly conceived Other is assumed to be inevitable . .
` Thus, alike in left-nationalist, Marxist ,`Subalternist , or feminist writings, the implicit standard of
judgement for evaluating initiatives and movements of nationalist formations, peasants, workers, religious
or ethnic groups, subordinated castes, even women, repeatedly becomes their `contribution’ or otherwise to
anti-colonial political or cultural independence. A fair number of feminist scholars, for instance, appear
slightly embarrassed about the laws banning sati , legalizing widow-marriage, and raising the age of
consent , that were passed by the colonial regime in the course of the nineteenth century , mainly at the
instance of Indian social reformers often not noticeably `nationalist’ . I have elaborated this argument in
my Beyond Nationalist Frames ( Delhi : Permanent Black, 2002) , Introduction, and passim.
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nationalism often placed the poverty of the country at the heart of their critique of
foreign rule ---- and such emphasis persisted in diverse forms throughout . Themselves
usually coming from fairly well-off class or caste positions, they seem to have been
affected by an important measure of elite guilt , as privileged people living amidst very
poor people . From here could emerge impulses that could make of nationalism
basically a critique of the present . The nation would be recognized as still in need of
`making’ or constitution , through remedying numerous problems and fissures not all of
which, perhaps , could be attributed solely to alien domination or exploitation .
Nationalism might then come to be associated with a variety of more or less radical
projects for socio-cultural and economic change alongside of the mounting of pressures
for political rights , autonomy, eventually independence . The alternative stress would
tend to project the nation ( or , with votaries of `communal ‘ politics , religious
communities, Hindu or Muslim ) as in every case an always-already existent glorious
entity , with a resplendent history and culture, free of blemish other than those imposed
by external invasion or domination alone . The objects of adherence and devotion then
get imagined as hard identities , and strivings for internal change might be frowned upon
as divisive . 5 Unlike the other frameworks I have been reviewing, my focus then will be
on degrees of fetishizations of the nation , and their consequences in terms of the
strengthening, or subversion , of hierarchies and power-relations .
The analytical framework I am trying to formulate has some resemblances
with certain distinctions that have been drawn in the context of European histories .
Hobsbawm in 1990 , for instance, in a book somewhat unfairly neglected, drew attention
to the specificities of the “ revolutionary-democratic patriotism “ of 1776 and 1789 ,
which emphasized not loyalty to a pre-existing unit , history , or even linguistic
difference ( strikingly absent , in the American case ) , but self-constitution of a new
nation through popular choice and action . Later nationalisms took their stand , in
important contrast , on real or imagined derivation “ from prior existence of some
community distinguishing itself from foreigners “, in terms of language , ethnic origin ,
religion, culture, or a sense of having belonged for a long time to a specific kingdom or
empire . `Patriotism ‘ of the first kind could be subversive enough of the status quo to
lead Dr Johnson to ironically define the patriots as “ factious disturbers of government .”
But of course the first type could often pass over into the second, and Hobsbawm
indicates such a transition at work from early on in the course of the French Revolution
itself . 6 One might think also of the categories used in the long-neglected study of
nationalism by the Austrian Social – Democratic theorist Otto Bauer, who attempted a
contrast between comprehending the nation “ as “ the never completed product of a
constantly ongoing process “ , and what he called “ national valuation” or “ national
spiritualism” , --- fetishizations , in other words -- which socialists need to critique “
rationally ” . 7 At the cost of sounding incorrigibly `Eurocentric’ , I must confess that I
5
It might be relevant to recall at this point a marked difference in temper between the rich debates on
theological and social reform issues within and between numerous Hindu , Muslim , and Christian groups
through much of nineteenth century India, and the hardened and often violent forms of religious identity
politics to which they gave place from around the 1920s onwards.
6
E.J.Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : Programme, Myth, Reality ( Cambridge, 1990 ),
pp. 20-22,87, and passim .
77
Otto Bauer , `The Nation ‘ , in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nstion ( London, etc : Verso ,
1996 ) , pp. 57. 64-67. This is a translation of the first chapter of Bauer’s work in German on
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occasionally find such writings, deliberately confined to the West ( or slipping off badly
when venturing outside its confines , as can happen on occasion even with Hobsbawm ) ,
more helpful in honing my own ideas than the politically-correct , but often overgeneralized , `postcolonial’ critiques of modern-Western cultural domination that have
become so familiar today.
II .
Space will not permit any detailed fleshing-out of my argument , in terms of
theoretical elaboration or presentation of empirical data . I confine myself to a few
very brief glances at some historical material , located at distinct conjunctures of lateand post-colonial South Asian history These might clarify to some extent the contrasts
and overlaps which I have just outlined , and perhaps suggest also some possible
explanations for the shifts noticeable across time in the relative importance of the forms
that I have tried to specify . 8.
In 1876, Dadabhai Naoroji published his Poverty of India , which soon
became a core text of the emerging Indian nationalist economic critique of British rule .
Here he attempted a statistical estimate , very impressive considering the early date and
not wildly out even in terms of current views of economic historians , of the per capita
income of Indians , and found it to be abysmally low by contemporary British standards :
two pounds sterling per head per annum . 9 In an argument that would remain more or
less standard for all subsequent anti-colonial critiques , irrespective of other differences,
this immense ( and possibly growing) poverty of India was directly related to specific
Imperial institutions and policies : a `drain of wealth’ through remittances to Britain of
government funds and profits of private British capitalists, excessive revenue pressures,
an alleged destruction of indigenous handicrafts , hindrances to nascent Indian industries
, etc. The presentation was kept deliberately logical rather than emotional , and there was
little or no appeal to any sense of cultural distinctiveness or lost glory . From this focus
on Indian poverty emerged patterns of thinking , and eventually action , seeking remedies
in varied , recognizably `developmental ‘ directions .
Around the same time ( c.1875 ) , Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, a founder of
modern Bengali prose and its first major novelist , wrote a hymn called `Bande Mataram‘
( `Hail, the Mother ‘ ) . It was published for the first time in 1882 , as part of his novel
Anandamath (`Abode of Bliss ) . Bankim in the 1870s had written acutely about the
misery of Bengal peasants, foregrounding their exploitation by Indian landlords . A
collection of his essays entitled Samya {Equality ] during that decade had even taken
some ideas from Rousseau and other Western egalitarian thinkers , and sharply
nationalisms in relation to social-democratic theory and politics ( 1907, 1924 ) , which still awaits an
English edition .
8
I intend to elaborate some of the themes that I will merely touch on in this draft in the final version of my
paper : particularly the responses of Tagore and Gandhi to the swing towards chauvinistic Hindu
nationalism in the wake of the decline of the Swadeshi movement after 1907-08 , and certain postcolonial
departures from earlier patterns .
9
Lord Curzon , a Viceroy noted for his aggressively-imperialist attitudes, came to a remarkably similar
estimate of per capita Indian national income in 1901. He tried to suggest, of course , that the figure was
not excessively low, that factors like adverse geographical conditions and Indian inertia were responsible
for Indian poverty, and that things were slowly improving under the benevolent rule of the British . An
estimate of the British per capita income in 1901 came to fifty-two pounds sterling : twenty-six times
greater . Amiya Bagchi, Private Investment in India , 1900-1939 ( Cambridge, 1972 ), p.3-4.
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criticized both caste and patriarchal oppression as evils as bad or worse than the loss of
political freedom . But for him the turn to nationalism was associated with a drastic
toning-down of such social criticism. The question of poverty still figures in
Anandamath , for this quasi-historical novel begins with a very vivid description of
peasants starving during the terrible famine of 1770 which had ushered in British rule
over Bengal . It is the Muslim Nawab and his underlings, however, who are mainly
blamed for the people’s misery , even though Bankim is most unlikely not to have been
aware that by 1770 real power in the province had clearly passed to the English East
India Company. Poverty, moreover, is powerfully described, but eventually occluded.
The story is about a rebellion , in which mobs of starving villagers are mobilized into a
disciplined army by a small number of elite sanyasis [ Hindu mendicants ] , who are
devotees of a `Mother’ who is at one and the same time the motherland , and the Hindu
mother-goddess Durga / Kali conceptualized in a totally novel manner . ` Bande
Mataram’ constitutes the core of their devotional practice . It begins with an evocation of
the beauty of the motherland , which passes over seamlessly into the depiction of the
grandeur , and then the power and martial prowess of the mother-goddess . There is one
passing reference to the country / goddess being at present “ weak” despite all her
potential strength , but the theme of poverty has disappeared from the hymn . The
imaginative appeal of the novel , and particularly the song , went far beyond the reach of
a coldly-rational treatise like Naoroji’s , but it also proved increasingly divisive . From
the time of the Swadeshi movement against the Partition of Bengal imposed by the
British in 1905 , the novel and its theme-song began to inspire militant , at times
terroristic , forms of anti-foreign action in ways much beyond the reach or intention of a
text like Naoroji`s . But the novel has always aroused considerable resentment among all
sections of Muslims, whether communally-minded or anti-colonial nationalist . From the
early years of the twentieth century onwards , `Bande Mataram ‘ became the central
Hindu-patriotic anthem-cum –slogan . It has also often served , right down to today, as a
Hindu-communal war cry in riot situations . 10
The contrasts between the two texts, of Naoroji and of Bankimchandra , are
evident , but there is also a certain convergence at one, less obvious , point . Nation ,
elevated and merged into religious icon , is externalized by Bankim into a Being that
demands devotion , service, sacrifice, dying and dispensing death . The concrete lifesituations of the inhabitants of the country tend to get occluded , and poverty vanishes
in a hymn extolling beauty , power, and violence. The problems may not entirely vanish
if we imagine now a switchover to an unimpeachably secular, anti-colonial register . A
process of fetishization is at work in Naoroji’s writings, too, though in a totally different
, quieter mode that operates mainly through silences and slippages. In ways that
constituted both the strength and the weakness of this and many similar critiques ,
possible distinctions and conflicts among Indians themselves were slurred over as much
as possible . At several places in his analysis of British economic exploitation , for
instance, Naoroji came close to a recognition that the processes were working mainly
10
There is a copious literary and historical literature on Bankimchandra. . My account is based primarily
on Tanika Sarkar, `Imagining Hindu Rashtra : The Hindu and the Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Writings ‘ ,
in her Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation : Community , Religion and Cultural Nationalism ( New Delhi :
Permanent Black , 2001 ). See also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya , Vande Mataram : The Biography of a Song
( New Delhi : Penguin India, 2003),
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through Indian intermediaries , and that there could be an "“internal drain “ that fed into
the external flow from out of the country . But the logic was repeatedly cut short at this
point to maintain the image of all Indians being equally victims. One particularly
revealing passage : “ In reality there are two Indias --- one the prosperous, the other
poverty-stricken. . The prosperous India is the India of the British and other foreigners.
… The second India is the India of the Indians .” 11 . And , through a process of
progressively diminishing circles of argument, what began as a discourse on abysmally
low per capita national income ends up with a demand for more jobs for educated
Indians in government services the immediate beneficiaries of which of course would be
a tiny minority . 12
Two kinds of questions emerge as we now try to move beyond this empirical
recognition of occasional affinities . The patterns that I have distinguished do remain
separate to varying degrees, despite a common impulse towards fetishization --- and the
difference can be related centrally to the emphasis on poverty in the first tradition :
poverty, and hence the need for development. Here , across time, different perspectives
came to be outlined : independent capitalist development with the early or Moderate
Congress, and in some sense throughout the history of `mainstream ‘ anti-colonial
nationalism ; radical , socialistic extensions among the Nehruvian , Left Congress , as
well as of course Marxist groups from the 1920s onwards ; the alternative posed by the
Dalit leader Ambedkar, combining a similar dream of an industrializing India with social
justice for subordinated castes . Even the Gandhian model, sometimes designated as
anti-developmental due to its rejection of industrialized modernity, was perhaps not all
that disparate, for it was based on a passionate concern for mass poverty, and tried to
combine periodic mass campaigns with sustained village-level `constructive work’ ,
geared to promote self-reliance, and marginal increase in peasant income .
`Development’ again, though through a very different mode . The striking exceptions are
the modes of communal thinking and practice, both Hindu and Muslim , where
fetishizations tend to take over much more seamlessly, and questions of poverty
virtually disappear . The other instance would be the groups of anti-colonial youth who
in the wake of the failure of the first major attempt to give a mass content to anti-British
middle-class politics ( the Swadeshi movement of 1905-08 ) turned to methods of secret
conspiracy and individual terror : efforts at once heroic, elitist , and often aggressively
Hindu-nationalist . 13
This leads us to the second question : why has the pull of essentialized notions
of the country or of religious identities been so persistent , across otherwise disparate
traditions ? Such tendencies are by no means peculiar , of course, to South Asian
nationalisms or communalisms ( one need only recall the ultimately disastrous
fetishizations of the `Party ‘ or the `socialist fatherland ‘ in Marxist-Leninist formations
) , but specific probings would still be helpful for particular expressions . Here I do not
11
Naoroji, quoted by B.N.Ganguli, `Dadabhai Naoroji and the Economic Drain ‘ , in Ganguli, Indian
Economic Thought : Nineteenth Century Perspectives ( New Delhi : Tata –McGraw-Hill , 1977 ). , p.148.
12
It needs to be recognized, though, that the latter plea, around which early `Moderate ‘ Congress
agitation often revolved , did represent a pertinent critique of racism, as well as an incipient demand for
some degree of control over the state apparatus by Indians that was capable of extension over time.
13
Not surprisingly , it is this strand of so-called `militant nationalism’ that is repeatedly chosen for
special praise in recent state-sponsored efforts to rewrite the history of modern India --- while an officiallysponsored high school textbook actually omits any reference to the murder of Gandhi.
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find the most common and `easy’ explanation --- in terms of the presence and felt threat
emanating from a dominant or hostile Other ( British imperialism for anti-colonial
nationalists, Muslim , Hindu or sometimes Christian for different brands of
communalism ) --- entirely convincing or sufficient . Nationalisms and communalisms
should be seen also as ideological projects geared towards overcoming more `internal’
kinds of disruption , trying to smooth over emergent contradictions through varying
forms of avoidance, suppression, hegemonization through limited accomodations, and,
above all, by highlighting the presence of external threats . 14 Let me cite two early
instances from late nineteenth –century Bengal . There seems to have been a link
between successive splits within the Brahmo socio-religious reform movement among
upper-caste Hindus in the 1860s and ‘70s , and the deployment by some of the factions
of a rather precocious language of nationalism . And a confrontation around 1890-1 over
a question of gender-related reform , the raising of the age of consent for marital
intercourse from ten to twelve for child-brides , promoted a sudden ( and short-lived )
lurch into an aggressively anti-British idiom on the part of Hindu revivalists who
otherwise had little to do with anti-colonial agitations . 15 In more general terms, it needs
to be emphasized that the late-colonial era was characterized by the more or less
simultaneous emergence of numerous, and cross-cutting, identity- projects , sharpening
divides , not just between British and Indian , but along lines of class, caste, religion,
ethnicity , language , gender . Much recent historical work has been exploring such
phenomena, relating them to the pressures and part-opportunities of late-colonial
structures and policies, the communicational integration associated with the coming of
print-culture and railways , the consequent emergence of one or several `public spheres ‘
, and the spread of elements of a new discourse of rights and equality. The latter took
the form usually of promises held out yet deferred, and therefore could become even
more explosive . 16 Unificatory projects, whether `nationalist’ or `communal’, I suggest,
14
Naoroji’ s quick elision of the `poor’ into generalized `poverty of India ‘ was probably not unrelated
to the fact that he, like the vast majority of early Congress leaders and activists , belonged to a highly
privileged and narrow upper stratum of colonized society : class was clearly a sub-text here . For some
revealing data indicating that the `moderation ‘ of this early generation of nationalists vis-à-vis the British
may have had something to do with fears that mass mobilizarion could threaten Indian property and
privilege also, see John R.McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress ( Princeton, 1977(,
Chapter 2, and passim.
15
I had touched on this possible connection between Brahmo sectarian controversy and early use of a
language of nationalism in an old essay of mine entitled `The Pattern and Structure of Early Nationalist
Activity in Bengal’ ( written in 1975 , published in my Critique of Colonial India , Calcutta : Papyrus,
1985 ). See also Chetan Bhatt , op.cit, pp.29-30 ; Amiya P.Sen, Hindu Revivalism in Bengal , 1872-1905
( Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1993) ; and , for the Age of Consent controversy , Tanika Sarkar, op.cit,
Chapter 6,7.
16
The British, for instance , frequently promised something like a career open to talent for educated
Indians, but maintained racist barriers in practice in state employment . The contradiction between liberal
professions and colonial practices became a major stimulus to all forms of nmiddle-class nationalism, from
Naoroji to Gandhi. British Indian law and education , again, theoretically held out prospects of legal
equality and opportunities for all irrespective of hierarchies of caste or gender , but of course the traditional
patterns of discrimination continued , and sometimes were even strengthened . Government schools in
late-nineteenth century Bombay Presidency, for instance , managed and taught by overwhelmingly highcaste men, did take in some children from lower castes, but then made them sit outside the class-room in
the sun or rain, so that their proximity did not pollute upper-caste pupils . This became a major issue for
emergent lower-caste spokesmen and activists . Philip Constable, ` Sitting on the school veranda :
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emerged in part as responses or reactions to such alternatives, and had to negotiate
between and across them in a variety of complicated and shifting modes.
The Bengal data from the decade immediately succeeding the Swadeshi
movement seems particularly revealing here . The ebbing of efforts on the part of
overwhelmingly high-caste educated Hindus, often connected with rentier interests , to
effectively mobilize the mostly Muslim or lower-caste peasants of Bengal , provoked
sharp opposition from both some Muslim communal groups and emergent associations
of subordinated castes . What complicated things further was that these years saw also a
sharpening of tensions between landlords, peasants, and share-croppers due to efforts on
the part of propertied groups to shift from cash-rent to produce-rent forms in the context
of rising crop-prices .The immediate, short-run reaction of nationalist activists was to
give up the mass contact efforts and take to the path of individual terrorism , and there
was an accompanying lurch towards sharpened Hindu-identity politics that anticipated
several of the themes of subsequent , developed Hindu communalism or `Hindutva’ of
the 1920s and later. But there was also an important, but often ignored or misunderstood
, emergence of alternative ways of thinking, notably through some writings of Tagore ,
sensitively bringing together themes of peasant poverty and exploitation , communalism,
patriarchal oppression of women , and aggressive, chauvinistic forms being taken by
Hindu and indeed all forms of nationalism. 17In addition, it has been cogently argued
recently that the emergence, precisely around these years , of the mature ideas of Gandhi
( his Hind Swaraj came out in 1909 ) needs to be interpreted in significant part as a
sharply hostile response to contemporary trends towards Extremist-terrorist and
chauvinistic Hindu politics . 18
It is in terms of varying relations with other putative or actualized solidarities that one
can best understand the distinctive trajectories of `developmental ‘ and `cultural’
nationalisms during the closing, post-1918 decades of British India. For these were years
when autonomous initiatives and movements were building up, of industrial workers ,
peasants , subordinated castes, religious identities , ethnic and linguistic formations, ,
women’s groups. All of them had part-autonomous histories of their own, not reducible
entirely to a single colonial / anti-colonial framework and / or standard of evaluation . An
anti-colonial middle class- led nationalism seeking to ease out British rule through mass
pressure had to make concessions, accommodate objectives which it had earlier ignored
ideology and practice of untouchable educational protest in late 19th century Western India ‘ ( Indian
Economic and Social History Review , 37,iv, October- December 2000).
17
I put forward some of these arguments in my doctoral work thirty years ago , but have recently modified
and extended them . See my Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-08 ( New Delhi : Peoples Publishing
House , 1973 ); ` `Identities and Histories : Caste in the Formation of the Ideologies of Nationalism and
Hindutva ‘ ( in Writing Social History , New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1997 ) and ` Intimations of
Hindutva : Ideologies, Caste and Class in Post-Swadeshi Bengal ‘ ( in Beyond Nationalist Frames , op.cit
). See also Pradip Kumar Datta, Carving Blocs : Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth Century Bengal (
New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1999 ) , Chapter 1, and passim ; and , for the post-Swadeshi
agrarian conjuncture , Nariaki Nakazato, Agrarian System in Eastern Bengal, c1870-1910 , Calcutta, 1994)
.
18
Antony J. Parel ‘s Introduction to his excellent edition of Hind Swaraj ( Cambridge : Cambridge
Texts in Modern Politics , 1997 ) presents evidence about the encounter between Gandhi and a group of
expatriate revolutionaries of this kind in London during the summer of 1909 . Prominent among them was
V.D.Savarkar, who some fifteen years later would publish what remains the central text of the entire
Hindutva tradition.
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or opposed . Every major movement generated pressures questioning the limits being
sought to be imposed by the Congress leadership , tensions directly related for instance to
the emergence by the late-1920s or `30s of an important Socialist and Communist
presence in some parts of the country . A largely reluctant Congress leadership was able
to maintain its overall hegemony only through gradually broadening its programmes in
significant though always limited ways, incorporating a measure of land reform , labour
legislation, and elements of affirmative action to remedy the grosser kinds of caste
discrimination . By the late-1930s , discussions had been initiated also by the Congress
about the contours of a partially-planned economy , with the apparent success of the
Soviet model providing a significant source of inspiration for some leaders like Nehru .
There have been sharply varying readings of this pattern . These have included
high praise for a masterly strategy of hegemony exercised in the cause of the nation,
denunciations as elite-determined betrayal of mass aspirations , and reluctant
acceptance as indicative of a pattern of `passive revolution’ similar to that diagnosed by
Gramsci for Risorgimento Italy . Other approaches, that appear to be gaining support in
recent years, would like to focus more on the specifics of Gandhi’s own philosophy and
praxis , and emphasize the originality and enduring value of his perspectives of
recognizing, respecting , and gradually transforming the Other (s) , instead of
surrendering to the processes through which identities get hardened and violently
confrontational. 19
What remains indisputable, I think, irrespective of such conflicts of interpretation ,
is a fact that does not surprise only because it is so familiar. The major part of the subcontinent did achieve after independence a constitution based on the principles of
democracy, secularism, federalism, and elements of social justice . None of these aims
had been particularly visible or clear to the highly elitist first generation of Moderate
Congressmen , and, even less , to the Hindu chauvinist Extremism and terrorism which
had displaced them for a time in the early twentieth century . They would have been
unthinkable without the working-out of a complex logic of mass nationalism interacting
with numerous alternative solidarities , which included several at times branded as antinational or pro-colonial . 20 Complexities like these help to substantiate one of the basic
arguments of this paper , that adequate understanding of anti-colonial nationalism
19
Bipan Chandra and some of his colleagues have been the best-known advocates of the first approach ;
the second was characteristic of one strand of Marxist writing. I had suggested the passive revolution
analogy in a paper published in 1976 ( `The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism : Civil Disobedience and the
Gandhi-Irwin Pact , 1930-31 , in Indian Historical Review , III , July 1976 ) , and Partha Chatterjee
extended and modified it in his 1986 work on nationalism . Two recent studies that I find very helpful ,
focussing upon the abiding value, as well as certain limits, of Gandhian perspectives , are Denis Vidal,
Violence and Truth : A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority ( Delhi : Oxford University
Press , 1997 ) , and David Hardiman, Gandhi in his time and ours ( Delhi : Permanent Black, 2003 ).
20
Lower-caste and Dalit formations often thought upper-caste dominated nationalism a greater danger then
British rule : their existence and pressures, however , were directly related to the shifts in Congress
perspectives towards affirmative action , away from a earlier virtual glorification of a `purified ‘ caste
system which Gandhi , too ,had indulged in. And while Muslim nationalism was of course eventually the
great area of failure of `mainstream’ anti-colonial politics, , its presence did help to block an over-unitary
political form which would probably have ensured a quick disintegration of the post-1947 Indian state . I
have tried to elaborate some of these themes in my `Indian democracy : the historical dimension’ , in Atul
Kohli, ed., The Success of India’s Democracy ( Cambridge, 2001).
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11
demands going beyond nationalism , exploring its interanimations with diverse other
narratives and trajectories .
Such expanding dynamism and vision stood in marked contrast to the alternative
communal strands of the same decades , and , notably , the Hindu nationalism that found
its classic theoretical form in Savarkar’s Hindutva : Who is a Hindu ? (1923 ) and
organizational core in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS , established in 1925) .
Savarkar’s text expounded with great eloquence a religious nationalism the basic criteria
for belonging to which would be purity of origin . ‘Fatherland ` and `holy land ‘ had to
be one and indivisible, and so only `Hindus’ , irrespective of internal differences could
qualify, while Muslims, Christians , and an extendable list of those charged with
succumbing to alien or western ideologies , could never be genuine patriots . Two
massive silences characterized the text . British rule was hardly mentioned , all the
nationalist fire being reserved for the alleged thousand-year old heroic struggle of Hindus
against Muslim invaders , and neither was the fact, so basic to other varieties of
nationalism , of mass poverty . The basic underpinning was clearly an exclusivist notion
of Hindu religious identity , but this was skilfully projected , both by Savarkar and
through the RSS which came to embody the organizational core of this ideologicalpolitical formation , through the apparently innocuous category of `culture’ . The RSS
became the embodiment of a total rejection of anti-colonial Gandhian nationalism , in a
contrast that has been well formulated recently by Chetan Bhatt. . 21
In sharp contrast to what has been happening in recent years , communal
formations in the era of anti-colonial struggles never attained the levels of mass
mobilization reached by Gandhian nationalism at its peak moments ( of 1919-22, 193034 , and 1942) --- with the possible exception, for a few years, of the Muslim League
campaign for Partition in the mid-1940s. The bulk of Hindu opinion remained with
Gandhi, perhaps in part because of his deployment, at once deeply sincere and effective,
of a traditionalist idiom even while seeking to insert important changes ( rejection of
untouchability though not usually of caste as a whole, for instance) within what he
projected as authentically Hindu . But this also produced major problems , deepening the
alienation of large numbers of Muslims and not satisfying the more radical among the
lower-caste critics of Brahmannical hierarchy. The subtleties of the Gandhian strategy
of “ reforming tradition by traditionalizing reform “ did not really percolate down to most
of his followers , who included large numbers of uncritical and even chauvinistic --- and
largely upper-caste – Hindus .22 Paradoxically , Muslim alienation may have been helped
unintentionally also by self-consciously secular, left-nationalist groups . Influenced by
what was then thought to be the sweeping success of the Soviet model, their perspectives
of planned industrial development tended to be bound up with a centralized vision of
21
“ … the RSS and its characteristic ideology of ordered and disciplined society , bodily control ,
hierarchy, conformity , and unanimist conceptions of collective Hinduism were formed in opposition to the
national movement’s strategies of disobedience , disruption , non-cooperation , equality and freedom.”
Bhatt, p.4. Possibly this slightly exaggerates , though, the quasi-libertarian aspects of the Gandhian
tradition, which were combined with a much less attractive stress on discipline , and within which vital
decisions like starting or calling-off movements were frequently made by Gandhi alone.
22
The quotation is from Bhikhu Parekh , Colonialism , Tradition and Reform : An Analysis of Gandhi’s
Political Discourse ( New Delhi : Sage, 1989) , p.225 . See also the very perceptive comments about the
value and limits of the Gandhian perspectives by the Dalit intellectual, D.R.Nagraj : The Flaming Feet : A
Study of the Dalit Movement in India ( Bangalore : South Forum Press , 1993 ) .
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12
India after independence . Demands for a less unitary polity , raised by many Muslim
groups eager to ensure minority protection in what was bound to be a Hindu-majority
India , were thus repeatedly rejected by a wide consensus of `mainstream’ nationalists ,
ranging from crypto Hindu-communal to ardently secular.
The generous visions of anti-colonial nationalism seemed finally
destroyed in the mid-1940s, amidst the communal holocaust that accompanied the
conjoint coming of freedom with partition . Yet, in a remarkable resurrection that
demands far deeper explication than has been given it so far , developmental nationalism
actually attained its apogee during the succeeding quarter-century , under Nehru and the
pre-Emergency Indira Gandhi . But the focus of attention most of the time today, for
entirely understandable reasons, has been on subsequent happenings : the abrupt eclipse
of that model from around the mid-1980s onwards. I cannot of course make much in the
way of substantial comments on this second transition, within the limits of a paper that
has already much exceeded the set limit . Let me confine myself to a quick listing of the
main ways in which I think the contemporary resurgence of Hindutva have been sought
to be explained , with some brief comments on their relevance --- and possible limits.
For I frankly feel that much remains still unexplored and insufficiently understood, and
that many of the somewhat formulaic explications remain unsatisfactory ---- and will
therefore end on a deliberately open-ended , inconclusive note .
An important academic-cum-political response to the unexpected rise of he
Hindutva through the Ram movement was the effort to explore its organizational and
ideological roots and ramifications, first at all-Indian and then also increasingly at
regional or local levels. Such work was able to foreground, more or less for the first time
, the crucial role of the RSS , for that had been virtually ignored so far by historians and
other commentators. Such work remains vitally necessary, for the sustained day-to-day
work in `cultural ‘ indoctrination , that has been brilliantly successful in areas where it
could be combined with political authority : as indicated most alarmingly by the recent
genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, followed by a sweeping electoral victory . But the RSS
style of slow training-up of cadres has been going on now for almost eighty years in
most parts of the country, with indifferent success for very long . The sudden recent
surge will demand a combination with other explanatory frameworks, along with a
deeper exploration of the ways in which the RSS and its affines have themselves changed
since the 1980s . Here the rise of the somewhat different Vishwa Hindu Parishad modes
of recruitment and functioning require particular atttention
During the run-up to the Babri Masjid destruction and its immediate aftermath ,
one kind of explanation ( combined with what has seemed at times an effective response )
that acquired considerable support in anti-communal circles was that the movement was
basically a kind of back-lash against the rise of lower and intermediate-caste groups , and
specifically the Mandal Report-derived move to extend reservations in the central
government services to the latter. The link between the hysterical upper-caste reaction to
so-called `Mandalization ‘ , and the peak of the Ram movement , was certainly clear and
important enough, and such an interpretation fits in rather well with explanations in
terms of responses of privileged groups to threats or pressures `from below’ which I,
and many other historians , have found helpful in earlier historical contexts. The logical
problem involved in over-stressing this link, however, is that similar, indeed
theoretically much more consistent and formidable pressures from subordinated castes
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13
and/or oppressed class-formations have been a fairly frequent feature of South Asian
history through late- and post-colonial times. The sheer extent of the reaction over the
last decade, the mass character suddenly acquired by the Hindu Right , still remains a
problem . And the conflict between the predominantly higher-caste adherents of
Hindutva and subordinated castes in which many liberals and secular people had placed
some hope has subsequently been complicated by the success of the former in winning
over substantial sections of the less privileged in some areas ( most formidably , once
again, in Gujarat) , as well as by the alliance the Bharatiya Janata Party was able to strike
for some years with the premier Dalit political formation in India’s biggest state .
A third much-favoured line of analysis, which promises also helpful
comparisons with other countries that have been witnessing a broadly similar pattern of
declining `developmental ‘ / emergent `cultural’ nationalisms, is of course the complex
of recent world developments conveniently often grouped under the somewhat catch-all ,
but still useful category of `globalization ‘ . Cultural nationalism . whether of religious or
ethnic kinds , then appears explainable as a surrogate for progressive surrender of
political and economic independence throughout the erstwhile Second and Third Worlds
. Such linkages are definitely important , but I would suggest that they are often being
presented in somewhat simplistic , under-researched ways, dictated, as so much of the
contemporary critiques have necessarily been , by the urgent needs of immediate
polemical intervention . For many cross-currents and complications do exist , with some
sections within the Sangh Parivar today clearly quite critical of too many concessions to
global capital, while conversely support for policies of `liberalization ‘ and
`privatization’ often cut across secular / communal divides . Once again, there remains
much need for specific and nuanced research about precise economic linkages , while
maybe some of the more crucial connection could be much more indirect rather than
crudely class-determined. One key new features of the past couple of decades has been
the withering –away among affluent or upwardly-mobile strata of a sensibility marked
by a degree of elite guilt , about being prosperous in a country with so many poor people.
This was a feeling that, as I have suggested , animated the core of nationalist ideology,
from Naoroji onwards , its abiding focus on the poverty of the country. . Its decline
demands an exploration that would include , but also go much beyond, the narrowly
`economic’
This brings me to my last problem : the ways in which the apparently
triumphant developmental nationalism of the early post-independence decades may have
contributed to its own eventual decline . This has attracted considerable attention, but the
focus, I feel has been often somewhat narrowly `culturalist ‘ , even misplaced What has
happened is a blurring together of two logically different types of criticism , one having
considerable validity , the other quite dubious . The `Nehruvian ‘ model has been
legitimately critiqued for its bureaucratic-statist , at times quasi-authoritarian aspects .
Perhaps even more important than the repressive aspects ( democratic norms, despite
occasional aberrations, were after all preserved , in sharp contrast to most other nonaligned or socialist regimes ) was the tendency for a political formation continuously in
power over several decades to ossify , become a dull `establishment’ , and increasingly
have recourse to fetishized images of nation and national state. Certainly for some time
in the 1980s and early `90s the Sangh Parivar was able to benefit from being able to
project itself as a party of rebellion or non-conformism, in total contrast to its entire
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previous history . But then the critique of the Nehru model gets associated with an
assumption that a secularism involving virtual rejection of indigenous religious traditions
had then been in power , provoking ultimately a reaction in the form of a return of the
repressed, a religious nationalism certainly often abhorrent , but still understandable .
The argument gets absorbed within an anti-modernist , anti-Enlightenment pattern of
thinking An important critique of excessively statist development thus gets merged with
assertions which historically remain extremely dubious, for Indian secularism , even
under Nehru , had never been anti- or even particularly non-religious.
But it needs to be added, in conclusion, that there still remains a need, and not in
India alone, to probe critically the problems of technocratic and statist notions of
development , associated for a whole era with `actually existing socialist ‘ regimes and
their pale imitators among newly independent states. The current conjuncture sometimes
makes many of us look back with some nostalgia on that vanished era, but nostalgia is a
poor historical and political guide .
Sumit Sarkar
.
( Delhi University)