3
What is implied by putting the term ‘discourse’ in the title, the very initial statement of our problem? Does this mean simply a casually fashionable way of indicating nationalist ideas? Or do we, by the use of this term, indicate that our inquiry would be of some particular type, or attend to some special aspect of nationalist thinking? Terminological questions should be sorted out first.
The term discourse can be used in a general way, but I intend to use it to emphasize the structure of nationalist discourse (Sathyamurthy 1989). A simply general way of using the term might jeopardize what we can eventually get out of our exercise if it is carried out systematically. Does discourse mean all that is said by people in the actual political world—the mere totality of words, ideas, concepts, and more complex combinations of these, like speeches, dispositions, programmes, rhetoric, ideologies, official documents—all of this without some discernible internal order; a totality that is as pointless as it is unencompassable? Politics is of course a world of words, but which words, which parts of these words and things made out of them are we trying to study in the analysis of discourse? Is it this totality? Is it an inner structure buried in it? Is it a conceptual grid which holds them together and sets limits to what can be thought and done through them?
Studies of discourse can turn to two different traditions of rigorous thinking about these questions. But the curiosities of these traditions go in distinctly different directions. The first of these is the tradition of structuralism of various types, starting from structural linguistics, which tries to separate out the differences between living speech, its effervescence, its contingency, its quick, dramatic life and death, and deeper underlying ordering forms which govern our ability to undertake such episodic speech through grammars ordinarily unavailable to common thinking.
These are deeper regularities—forms, constraints, limits—which make speaking, writing, thinking what they are without being interchangeable. Speakers implicitly obey constraints of grammar without being able to formulate its formal rules and exact restrictions. These rules form a structure, latent, constraining, unavailable to the ordinary user of language, and consequently recoverable by deliberate strategies of research. Foucault extended the existence of such grammars from natural language to conceptual and theoretical languages and would identify deep structural networks of exclusion, silence, various forms of unutterability constituting the vital frontier between what can be said inside a discourse and what cannot (Foucault 1972: especially 46ff.).
Of equal distinction is a second tradition in which the study of discourse represents an object with just the opposite characteristics. To Volosinov (Bakhtin), equally interested in what can be done to the world through words and the subtle politics of representations, study of discourse means precisely living speech, the performance, the enactment with its circumstances and conditions, not the deep configurations which make them possible. In his work, the silent constraining existence of these deep configurations is not denied, but he is primarily interested in understanding how their classical lines are being constantly wrenched in different directions, and how the contingent but insistent demands of social life alter them historically. For Volosinov, Saussurian structures can never fully explain or clarify why what is said is said. It can indicate what kinds of things in principle can be uttered under some structural conditions. It never shows how a particular speech came to be chosen out of those that are all structurally equally possible. Structure, in this sense, cannot explain history; though structuralists would answer—I think justifiably—that structures do not aim at explaining history in this sense. On this view, discourse study must try to capture precisely the irruption of linguistic phenomena, the individuality of living speech, expressions of experience, or poetically, the breath of life (Volosinov 1986).
Schematically, we can isolate three ways in which the term discourse is used in political analysis: the first is a general use of the term which indicates that a body of ideas has a certain internal coherence both due to their linguistic meaning and external association with political events so that they are grouped together in history. These two ways of imparting coherence to ideas can loosely be called internal and external; the first a coherence imparted to them by their conceptual meanings, and the second by their act-meanings (or force, to use Austin's language). Both these aspects have to be gathered up in a Marxist conception of ideology.
Vulgar conceptions of ideology, using a simple dichotomy between a correct and a false consciousness, may not be able to incorporate such inflections, but a more sophisticated rendering of the argument extending Volosinov's distinction between theme and meaning must move in that direction. Indeed, the purpose of the theory of ideology is precisely to insist that use-meanings and act-meanings go together in historical analysis. Inside this kind of a theory of ideology, we can then take recourse, when necessary, to the more rigorous distinctions made by the two types of discourse analysis.
In the analysis of nationalist discourse, it seems a more promising approach to search for simple versions of false consciousness. If there is any field about which nationalist thought establishes plausible but misleading narratives, it is about the society it tries to bring under its political control and its historical self-representation. But this narrative emerges in several distinct stages: it acquires a particular outline through its first skirmishes with colonialist ideology, and this narrative of the self bears a strong historical relation with the early growth of nationalist politics. After some time it has clearly crossed the threshold, and the initial narrative about the self is restructured in the Gandhian phase of Indian nationalism. Finally, there is a third stage, post-Independence, in which this narrative undergoes some significant changes associated with the demands of serving as an ideology of a new nation state. In this essay I shall try to present a brief account of this process of historical re-formation of the nationalist narrative.
If we take nationalism seriously as an ideological discourse, it is not adequate merely to say that it is a configuration of false but plausible beliefs. Each ideology arranges its falsity and plausibility in its own particular way. Thus, it becomes vacuous merely to assert its falsity. Its peculiar structure and form must be unravelled. Ideologies appear to have an intimate connection with history and its narrative construction, the persuasiveness with which historical constructions enable people to make sense of the complexities of the modern world. The power of modern ideologies depends often on its self-portrayal, its rendering of its own history.
The first step in developing the critique of any ideological discourse then must be to disbelieve its autobiography, the history it gives to itself (Chatterjee 1986: 51). While dealing with Indian nationalism, Marxists often fail to make this primary move. It is more common to take for granted the history that nationalism has traditionally made familiar, only to contest its ideological evaluation at some crucial points. Thus, it is usual to agree that the Gandhi–Irwin pact was a crucial stage in the history of the nationalist movement, but see it as a ‘sellout’ to imperialism rather than an ‘astute step of temporary retreat’ (Dutt 1970).1 Similarly, it is usual to write the story of the Congress in terms of the division between Moderates and Extremists, but see the Moderates as social progressives (Roy 1971). I am far from suggesting that these arguments and evaluations are wrong. But in order to understand nationalism better, we must transcend these descriptions internal to nationalist history and attend to other things which have, for various reasons, not found a significant place in this history—other regularities, other structures, other resemblances.
Two questions are central to this enterprise: what is the discourse of nationalism? Secondly, what is the right way of going about understanding it? I assume that nationalist discourse refers to the intellectual process through which the conception of an Indian nation is gradually formed, the discourse that forms it, is in favour of it, and gives it historical shape. I shall try to indicate some major stages by which this imagining of the nation happens, treating it as contingent and historical, rupturing the absentminded and long-practised continuities through which we customarily think about this. The right way of understanding it, it seems, is not to follow its own telling, but to surround it with other relatively neglected cultural processes which provide it with its historic preconditions (Guha 1982–91).2
To modern students of colonialism, the early reception of ambitious European merchants in Indian society may appear puzzlingly positive. Indians who saw Europeans take the first steps towards colonial power did not respond with strong resentment; for reasons which are easily found. Traditional ruling groups, consisting of rajas and nawabs and their effete quarrelsome nobilities, could not conceive of an eventual British capture of their continental country. They saw them as transient enemies or allies, depending on how their loyalties were ranged, and since the British made it amply clear that their loyalty to Indian rulers was far from unchangeable, even present enemies realized the possible future usefulness of these potentially powerful allies in what was bound to continue, in their view, to be a predominantly domestic scramble for political ascendancy.
Surely, they were not the only social group whose destiny was to be affected by colonialism. Lower orders of society were customarily far-removed from turmoil at the upper stratum of political authority, and looked at the rise and fall in the fortunes of their distant lords with indifference. Some other, primarily intermediary, groups responded to the European presence more positively, as it provided unforeseen avenues of advancement. To their intellectuals it provided, or seemed to promise, a historical opportunity of subjecting a traditional social order to criticism. For these groups the attraction was very strong indeed, precisely because it occasioned the happy merger of moral and material interests.
Early responses to European entry into India were, interestingly, dominated by political and cultural considerations, rather than basic economic ones. Much of the early thinking of Indians about colonialism centred less on the hard economics of exploitation and more on the cultural ‘meaning’ of Europe. Europe meant different things to different generations of Indians who came into contact with its impressive power and glamorous modernity.
This was again due to two reasons. Europe was going through a period of unprecedented rapid change in its economy, political institutions, and culture; and kept offering a different countenance to the world which observed this new kind of society with wonder. Europe, before and after the Cromwellian revolution, before and after the French revolution, before and after Napoleon, before and after 1848, before and after the coming of socialism, before and after the unification of Germany, before and after the World War, and before and after Nazism could not either materially or symbolically appear the same.
These events appeared disorientating enough to those who experienced them in Europe, but they at least carried with them the consolation of historical immediacy. To Indians, wildly enthusiastic or denunciatory about that history, but less informed, unacquainted with the culture or politics which supplied these events with their internal causal logic, it must have appeared a bewildering illustration of de Tocqueville's dictum about modernity: a time when living is strenuous because ‘the past had ceased to throw light upon the future’ (de Tocqueville 1974: 396–7).
But Indian reaction was limited or constrained not only because of its relative lack of information; Europe came to India predominantly through powerful rationalist narratives. Successful civilizations always construct myths about themselves. The European intellectuals’ feeling that the meaning of modernity was still unclear, its processes still unmastered, its riddle not unravelled, did not stand in the way of the creation of ideological myths and their persuasive narratives. Ideological narratives simplify historical complexities of the growth of a civilization and force it into an accessible group of cliches. The first encounter of Indian intellectuals with Europe's history was through a mythical narrative of this kind—the great story of reason—conveyed to them through the curricula used in the institutions of new Western education. In time, greater acquaintance with Europe's history served to destroy this classical ideological theory. The idea of Europe came to acquire much greater complexity and the narrative of European reason lost some of its stifling dominance.
In later nationalist thought it was realized that trajectories of modernity differed from one part of Europe to another, and even after the stabilization of distinctly similar forms of modern social life all over Europe serious dissimilarities persisted. French and British political institutions were recognizably different even at this distance, and gave rise to constantly renewed polemics between conservative and radical sections of European liberal opinion. Ideologically, Europe did not present a homogeneous picture either, contrary to the mythology of reason—a narrative which attempted to demonstrate the triumph of European rationality starting from ancient Greece, through Rome, down through the southern and northern renaissance into a generalized modern rational life evenly shared by the inhabitants of this enlightened continent.
In the later discourse of Indian nationalism, this internal diversity of Europe, the several voices with which Europe spoke in history, was utilized to great polemic effect. Dissenting intellectual trends within European modernity, sometimes trends which dissented from modernity itself despairingly—especially romanticism, idealism and, later, socialism—found their way straight and easily into the nationalist's heart because of their different yet related contributions to a critique of the crystallizing discourse of bourgeois modernity. In his/her search for foundations and support, the nationalist, in a gesture of implicit internationalism, often turned to them.
Colonialism entered Indian society initially in stealthy steps, through misunderstandings and misconstruals. Indeed, before it took firm political root, the British were more concerned to conceal the extent of their success than to make a display of it, for fear of putting into effect a desperate and overwhelming opposition against the power of alien intruders. However, once it became stable, the colonial state came to acquire not only a particular economic structure and form but was also inextricably linked to some cultural processes.
Acts of the colonial establishment in India were poised between three different publics at the same time. Its actions had to make sense to a public at home exulting in the achievements of rationalistic modernity, including its military adventures in faraway foreign lands. Due to its demands, colonial administrations slowly had to change their policies of a minimal cultural strategy, keeping away from troublesome entanglements in processes of reform. Demands from a section of the native elite, which played on the distant but more compelling expectations of British public opinion, made such indifference untenable. It became, through a slow but irreversible process, an apparatus which set out on a large ‘civilizing’ process—of altering, restructuring, conquering the most difficult terrain of all—the culture of Indian society, the realm of the mind (Deuskar 1970).3
When administrators from one culture face another, strange and incomprehensible, there is an understandable inclination to start from a presumption of similarity, and gradually, through experience, work in perceptions of difference. This movement from similarity to difference remains always an imperfect and unconcluded process. Always, some part of this project of defamiliarization remains unachieved or uncomprehended. Colonial rulers, when they undertook reform, worked with a picture of the cultural structure of Indian society that was surreptitiously similar to the one in bourgeois Europe—a culture that was highly integrated after the success of bourgeois revolutions, which had a common core of moral, cognitive, and social beliefs at their centre constituting a general, social ‘common sense’. This stock of beliefs mirrored the structure of society, and holding them made the business of undertaking social actions more internally consistent and practically successful.
This core of beliefs was articulated and re-coordinated to contingent historical needs by a specialized intelligentsia, often by means of social theory. Evidently, the cultural organization of traditional Indian society was not like this in all respects, but colonial policy-makers assumed that it was. The colonial order followed what could be called a strategy of ‘Gramscianism’, assuming that if the structure of common sense beliefs of the directive classes in Indian society was altered, this would gradually lead to an alteration of the core common sense of society as a whole.
Historically most remarkable was the mixture of success and failure encountered by this cultural strategy of colonialism, and its long-term unintended consequences. Eventually, the colonial establishment was able to alter the entire conceptual apparatus of a significant crust of the Indian elite, especially the new elite that had come into being through the colonial process itself. Given the model of unified European societies, through the general laicization of knowledge, these groups, by virtue of constituting the intellectual elite, should have performed the function of being the creators, shapers, repositories, and communicators of its common sense.
However, the unqualified successes of the colonial educational process made this impossible. It created a new elite without much historical continuity with traditional social groups which had earlier performed these functions. Indeed, their cultural transformation was so drastic and complete that it turned around what may be called, in Dilthey's (1974: 171 and 231) well-known phrase, the ‘historical a priori ’ of their thinking about society and history, and the basic register of identification of social objects themselves.
A most vital part of this cultural transformation consisted of the alteration of their historical aspirations; in other words, given their new way of thinking, the new elite came to be covetous of the history of the West, along with its prosperity, technical control, and political power. However, the very success of the colonial enterprise made the fulfilment of its other, related objective less likely. The more British cultural policy was successful in transforming the conceptual alphabet of this group, the further it was removed from its deeper historical objective of fashioning a new common sense for the entire Indian society through their intermediation. The more the British persuaded them, the less their collective ability to persuade the rest of Indian society. This frustrated the plan of making the Indian people, through their intellectual dominance, see the social world in a manner that would make colonialism appear largely as a benign institution—an altruistic enterprise in the spread of enlightenment.
The acquisition of this alphabet of thought made this class gradually share its language, common presuppositions, theories, prejudices, and inclinations with the Western intelligentsia and colonial administrators; but it also broke off, in the course of a single century, any links it may have had with their own society's popular discourse. The consequence of this direction in Indian culture is immediately reflected in the history of protests against British rule.
The insurrection of 1857, despite its traditional elite leadership, contained ideological motifs, organizational principles, social norms, and political slogans that were more genuinely common between different social groups. It could thus create, however temporarily, a bond between traditional elites and the rebellious peasant–soldiery of the Company. Afterwards, grievances against British rule certainly did not disappear, but the discontent of the upper and lower orders lost a common language, forcing middle-class discontent to turn into the mendicant constitutionalism of the early Congress, and the resentfulness of the subaltern classes into occasional, blind, local outbursts. Both types of disorder were much easier for British authorities to contend with, all serious threat having to wait until their reconnection after the arrival of Gandhi.
The entry of colonialism not only introduced a set of unfamiliar new institutions into Indian society, but also a set of discourses on which the functioning of these institutions depended. Although the new middle class had enthusiastically accepted its alphabet, it would be wrong to argue that these altered only their social world. The social world was decisively restructured for all groups and social classes, irrespective of whether they accepted it, liked it, or underwent a training in using this discourse of colonial rationalism. Even those left out of this crucial education, or those who sought to resist its advent, were obliged to live in a world which was transformed in fundamental ways.
There is a strong temptation to think theoretically about this transition through the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft which Tönnies used to analyse the rise of European modernity. What happened in India does not seem to fit easily into the Tönnies framework.4 The transition appears to have been from one type of community to another, rather than to an unqualified form of gesellschaft. In traditional society, people did have a strong sense of living in gemeinschaft organizations. But the colonial drive towards a truncated and distorted modernity does not force people to change their life into unambiguously gesellschaft-like associations. They move from a fuzzy conception of community to one of an enumerated kind.5
The lived world of society was traditionally marked by the sense of community, an unexplicated, pre-reflexive sense of belonging to collectivities which produced the individuals who lived in them, unlike the modernist conception of pre-existing individuals producing collective entities. This traditional community sense was fuzzy in two ways. First, because, in a variety of instances of social exchange, persons would have chosen different types of senses of belonging in order to give themselves a social face. An individual, when asked to define who s/he was, could have mentioned his/her village, his/her region, religious denomination, caste. There was also the territorial boundary of the kingdom, though these must have been the least determinate because so heavily prone to fluctuation.
Among these identities some are territorial (village, kingdom, region), though territoriality could be of different sorts (Fox 1977). Others are clearly non-territorial. What is central in this configuration of identities available is that a traditional person would not have been under such pressure to clarify the identity-structure in terms of which s/he lived. They would not accord to these identities a clear hierarchy: these would be ranged in a line out of which s/he would pick out the right one, as the occasion demanded. The arrangement of identities is fuzzy in the sense of being indeterminate in rank order; though, paradoxically, this allows for greater precision and flexibility in the social identification of persons, and is more complex than the modern unidimensional assertion of a national tag.6
There is a second sense in which communities are fuzzy. Some of these communities do not have clear territorial boundaries, or a map in the way modern societies must have. It is a world of a much finer, graded, and more complex organization of difference, much like the way one tone of colour would shade off into another in a spectrum. The best illustration of this can be that of the history of formation of linguistic communities, one of the identities with which the identity of the nation must later compete for loyalty and space.
Indian society had traditionally, due to the caste system, known a dual system of high and low language. The structure of its speech communities would have had something like the form in Figure 1.7
Fig. 1
(Note: While those who had c had only c, users of b could use bc; and correspondingly, users of a had abc, though, obviously, those who knew Sanskrit did not necessarily know Arabic–Persian and vice versa.)
It will be noticed that such a structure is not extraordinary: it is, indeed, exactly similar to the structure of agrarian societies outlined in Gellner's studies. A small, spatially dispersed but more tightly knit and self-recognizing élite can keep under its control the horizontally segmented masses of the ordinary people. This was certainly true of the superior caste-for-itself character of the Brahmins, as opposed to the other more deeply segmented castes.
Thus we have to modify the usual segmentation thesis about Indian society; though all parts of society were segmented, they were not segmented in the same way, to the same extent, or with the same consequences. This principle of differential segmentation was reflected still more intensely at the level of spoken language, where language shows its universality. At the lowest level, then, language communities were speech communities of dialects confined to small areas, and heightened a feeling of a pre-critical identity among its native speakers. To fit this picture of difference between neighbouring dialects into a modern map would be difficult. Modern maps would require clear boundaries and thresholds. In this picture one dialect would gently and imperceptibly shade off into the next. Thus, even though the region now called Bengal might speak dialects belonging to a single family, and thus related to each other, at the edges of this region, in Medinipur or Mithila, the dialect would not be demonstrably different from the neighbouring speech of Orissa or Bihar.
Into this world of gradual difference, new forces were released by the entry of colonialism. The emergence of dominant economic and social elites, which enjoyed the circumstantial gift of the colonizers’ partiality, created ‘natural’ norm-setting communities in particular regions. The dialect spoken around the once unknown hamlet of Calcutta, formerly without any particular claim to literary eminence or aural melody, suddenly emerges as the indispensable vehicle of a high Bengali literary culture.8 As the power of this elite became more entrenched along with their colonial patrons, and the coming of the printing press, its preeminence was soon inscribed on the language, through the general acceptance by regional Bengali elites of its grammatical and syntactical foibles and subsequently through imitation of pronunciation. The local elites of outlying regions, and Orissa and Bihar on the borders of Bengal, would start copying this language, initially for formal communication and writing, and later for oral exchange, in order to underline their membership of the elite grouping, not only economically but also in terms of its styles of cultural self-identification.
This is particularly attractive for the new bhadralok elite, because it provides them with a constantly used social signifier which marks them off from the slovenly lower orders. Their claim to distinction cannot be mistaken the moment they open their mouths, and this process of linguistic refinement is carried to such excessive lengths that it would not be far wrong to say that the Bengalis are a people held together by the differences in their language. Through such processes of élite homogenization, it becomes possible, after about a century, to draw a modern linear boundary between regions, because similar processes are also at work on the other side.9 While, in the sixteenth century, it might be impossible to tell the difference in dialect between neighbouring villages, by the mid-nineteenth century it becomes possible to say that two villages belong to two different speech communities, and that this determines their political, economic, and cultural demands, rights, and aspirations. It must be recognized, however, that at lower levels of the social order the earlier system of spectrum-like difference might still survive, and remain effective in everyday life.
What is the relation between this story, if credible, and the story of nationalist discourse? There are two significant connections. First, nationalist discourse is crucially connected with the political use of languages, and the relation between English and the vernaculars; mature mass nationalism invariably has to await the emergence of cultures of vernacular assertiveness. Second, there is also the vital question of what exactly should be the relation between the two strata of identities—the national (which in India does not have a linguistic marker) and the regional (which does): in one view, the absence of a spontaneous community with those speaking the same language, a major source of strength of nationalism in the European context, becomes a source of weakness in the Indian subcontinent.
The first implication emerging from this specificity in relation to India is that an idea often adopted by nationalists influenced by modernization theory has to be rejected. The conventional dichotomy between a recent, constructed, occasionally even rational, identity of the nation and the primordial and pre-existing identity of the region is undermined. It must be recognized that although in many parts of India vernacular languages may have originated as early as the tenth century, regional political identity centred on a language is a relatively recent phenomenon, derived largely from the same historical forces. To decide between the claims of the region and the nation is not to choose between a modern and a relatively ancient identity, but two configurations thrown up by the same historical process.10
Into the earlier world of fuzzy identities colonialism, especially its rationalist cognitive apparatus working most strikingly in administration and education, brings in an entirely new way of making sense of and acting practically in the world. The census, initially planned in 1862, eventually carried through in 1872 (Barrier 1981), is part of a process of immense and irreversible enumeration of the social world; it creates a new world of maps, boundary lines, divisions, numbers and statistics, and a new technique of living in terms of these. Once this social ontology is firmly grounded in the main social practices of the state and dominant groups, its logic sinks into the everyday consciousness of the lower orders as well.
A second aspect of this change in social ontology also needs to be mentioned. Certainly, all these new definitions require a certain cognitive apparatus disseminated by special educational and intellectual processes. The majority of Indian people remained unlettered, and therefore distant from this formidable apparatus. Yet it would be fallacious to believe that, because they had no secure control over these skills, their world remained unaffected by its consequences. Not to be able to count does not mean that people can remain immune from the processes of this fateful counting. To be illiterate does not mean remaining unaffected by new boundaries drawn upon the world by literate politics. Gramsci's theory points out graphically how illiteracy is a form of political resourcelessness, how, precisely because they are culturally deprived, poorer people are powerless against hegemonic processes and respond blindly to agendas set by others.11
Today, an unlettered Muslim might not know exactly how many per cent of India's population belong to his/her community, but s/he surely knows s/he is a member of a minority group and how to behave in accord with that knowledge, and what implications this has for his/her political rights. One implication of this modern world in which boundaries are clear, distances are measured, and populations are enumerated—a world grasped in numbers in every sense—is often missed in nationalist thought.12 It is now not only the national community which is counted and feels invigorated by this statistic; so do all other potential communities—religions, castes, sects, languages.
All these identities, which can be candidates for political mobilization when associated with a sense of disadvantage and distress, can now mobilize their knowledge of numbers, territorial distribution, social award of benefits, and make politically adroit uses of the display of the power of helplessness. There is no historical necessity which ensures that the nation wins out, the historical pronunciation of a certain identity—that of the nation—among all others is entirely dependent on the process of politico-cultural persuasion. Politics decides which arguments win and lose in the increasingly open and crowded marketplace of ideas about identities.
It is thus not a matter of inner necessity, but political contingencies and some luck, that it was eventually a largely, vaguely, idealistically, and optimistically secular identity which came to represent the identity of the Indian nation. It was a fragile achievement, fortunate for some. But this was not the end result of a linear and simple process. However, there are two current narratives through which nationalism presents itself to its adherents.
The first, which is both simple and linear, works with a minimal definition of nationalism (based on the ideas of those who opposed the British) and assimilates the most diverse strands of thought and activity into this concept. Tipu Sultan, Nana Fadnavis, the Rani of Jhansi, Mir Kasim, and Gandhi and Nehru are treated together as coming under the same broad trend of anti-imperialism. Incongruously, this would also include figures such as Raja Ram Mohun Roy—who never wished the British empire ill—to form an impressive but also misleading pageant.13
More recently, a second narrative has gained currency which would simply deploy a criterion of the Nehru brand of nationalism and exclude from the title ‘nationalist’ all those who failed to fulfil its retrospective demands (e.g. Chandra et al. 1988). A surprisingly large number of nationalist figures would fail the test if it were to be stringently administered; besides, it would also produce a misleadingly benevolent picture of what Indian nationalism in reality was. Its drawbacks are twofold. First, this view romanticizes Indian nationalism by neglecting the power of strong religious, occasionally communal, sentiments that often worked in its favour, even within the Congress. Second, it gives us a false picture of the past, and would have us believe that all forces of nationalism were in favour of a secular state (Chatterjee 1965).14 This will grossly underestimate the difficulties in the way of secularization of the state in modern India.15
To understand nationalism it is essential to break away from these narrative structures, but that is not easy, because we have ourselves lived inside them, and they have, in large part, helped us constitute ourselves.
Of necessity, colonial ideology in its early phase underplayed the enormity of the political change taking place in India. This may or may not have been due to deliberate design or cunning. The process of establishment of British dominion over India was very uneven, and initially shaky, It depended vitally on preventing the cementing of an overwhelming coalition against itself. A voluble ideology of colonialism under these circumstances would have been injurious to British interest.
The first steps taken by this colonial power were not accompanied by an overarching ideology of social reconstruction or historical ‘improvement’; rather, British agents sought to create a misleading feeling of the everydayness of their efforts, so that they were seen as one unremarkable party among many others contending to advance their material interest in a fluid political situation. To the extent rationalist ideas played any part at this stage, it appears to have been limited merely to accentuating a sense of invincibility of British arms.
In deep isolation in such a varied and alien land, without hope of quick reinforcements, they liked to picture themselves, entirely understandably, as invincible warriors with guns in their hands and reason on their side. It was important to convince not only themselves but also their Indian adversaries and fickle friends. Even this attenuated version of occidental presence introduced a militarily conceived notion of superior modernist rationality. Several of the more successful Indian rulers, Tipu Sultan in the South and Ranjit Singh in the North, showed their acceptance of this idea by enlisting the skills of European gunnery, sometimes by employing European mercenaries despite their reputation for notorious undependability.
The theatres of war in early colonial India were at the same time theatres of ideological conflict, a constantly renewed and repeatedly lost battle against European reason in military uniform. The eventual failure of all opposition by native powers against British rule posed a basic historical question to thinking Indians: how does one explain this failure—its persistence and finality?—since, clearly, this was not a failure of individuals, but of an entire civilization. Was it to be consigned to an extraordinary series of military accidents? Or to some underlying historical necessity? In any case, how did Indians cope with the forces of modernity that Europe represented?
The answer came in two directly opposite forms. The first acknowledged the superiority of European arms, but extended this to the related superiority of principles of social organization. But, interestingly, adherents of this view refused to accept any racialist or historical essentialism which often went with this belief; in other words, there was something in the social character of Europeans which made such feats possible but barred these to mere Indians.
The ‘Young Bengal’ movement, which saw such rationalist symbolism in food and dress, and found in forbidden meat not only good food but also evidence of philosophic rationalism, was one illustration of this line of thought. But Bengal also witnessed an understandably conservative reaction which wished to deploy against the British the strategy which, they believed, had worked against Muslim rulers of Hindu society—of secreting the operation of the basic social processes by raising barriers of orthodoxy. By intricate interdictions and prohibitions, they would draw their social practices away from the inchoately emerging arena of public law and open debate. The convention of open public discussion of the rationality of religious practices appeared to them a particularly threatening device exclusively meant to bring ridicule upon indigenous religion and to subvert them.
As colonialism grew more stable and the administration grew less anxious about the durability of the empire, the nature of the argument from the colonial side underwent rapid transformation. Colonial modernity was now pictured as an advanced social form, internally consistent, though occasionally flawed because of the hesitation and cowardliness of colonial policies of social reform. Gradually, the justification of British power in India was taken over by arguments of distinctly utilitarian provenance.
Utilitarianism exercised a powerful appeal on the collaborative Indian intelligentsia for two related reasons. First, it offered in a schematic form the outline of a general rationalist theory of history; it allowed Indians and the British to have a common and discursive picture of historical evolution and a common language to dispute its intermediate hypotheses. It made collaboration easier, and at the same time made it appear not as collaboration. Within its rational frame, some answer could be sought to the great puzzle of Indian experience—what was happening in Indian history, going beyond the purely parochial accounts of glory or misfortunes of single dynasties or regions.
Utilitarianism offered a simple theory of transition. It saw the current historical process as progress, a unilinear, largely teleological movement of all societies towards technological modernity and attendant forms of social organization represented by nineteenth-century Europe. Civilization was the common fate of all humanity; only some societies were able to devise these processes endogenously and others would have to undertake this enlightening journey under the tutelage of the pioneers. Utilitarian theory thus perfectly fitted the colonial setting.
Just as it undermined earlier prescriptivist theories in Europe, it undermined the traditional title to rule of indigenous claimants to political power. Utilitarianism taught people to judge all such claims consequentially. The right to rule simply should accrue to those who would provide more of the benefits of modern civilization to larger numbers. By this logic, the claim of the British to political authority in India after providing it with stability, administrative unification, rational legal systems, modern education, and other material benefits of modern civilization, was clearly incontestable. No wonder some early nationalist thinkers spent a good deal of time disputing whether the right to rule of an enlightened foreign ruler was weaker than those of malignant indigenous tyrants. Many of them had to admit that the claim of simple indigenism was sentimental and unacceptable (Chatterjee 1986).
By the 1880s the hitherto unproblematic dominance of utilitarian theory began to be challenged. Indeed, the original forms in which challenge was mounted were to be of indelible significance to the ways in which nationalist Indians, since then, have tried to come to terms with their history. This critique was mounted first by writers who are conventionally, unjustifiably in my view, characterized as conservatives.
To question the ideological conceits of British imperial authority against the tide of the times was hardly an unproblematically conservative attitude. Partly, of course, this is a problem of interpretive classification: this tendency to regard thinkers as conservatives, liberals, and radicals derives from the unthinking imitativeness of both nationalist and some Marxist historiography. The practitioners of both these tendencies believed that they performed their classificatory obligations by finding the most perfunctory similarity between Indian and European currents of thought.
Since utilitarianism justified modernity, the critical argument maintained that it was possible to contest the moral validity of the claims to modernity's superiority over tradition, or of the organization of modern European over other social principles. This was not merely the other side of rationalism, as European romanticism was, which shared a great deal of the deep structural elements of rationalist thought. It signified a deeper rejection—a combination of misunderstanding, apprehension, and rejection out of conviction, and in the late nineteenth century it required great intellectual courage to take this line against the easy triumphalism of colonial ideology, and the still flimsier rationalism of job-seeking babus.
Without doubt, this ideological position was itself something of a complex mixture with individual inflections on various themes. In acknowledging evident European superiority in the sphere of instrumental action and natural sciences that were based on it, these writers occasionally fell into the trap of Orientalism itself, accepting a stereotype unfavourable to themselves and trying unsuccessfully to make it work against its inner logic. Chatterjee (1986) has argued this position forcefully.
Intellectuals fashioned two different, yet complementary, arguments against the idea that colonial rule constituted a conferment of modern civilization. Authors such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, sensitive to the smallest inflection in cultural processes, began to point towards an irremediable limitation of colonialism's modernizing impact.
What was going on in India was not just a slower, less complete process of modernization. Modernity consisted of two processes or trajectories, the first one proper to the metropolitan societies, and another appropriate for the colonies. There was an undeniable likeness between the two, but it was the resemblance between an original and its travesty.16 It was the Indian intellectual's relative unfamiliarity with the details of European history which alone allowed social change under colonial rule to be passed off as a re-enactment of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois transformation of Europe's social life. Familiarity with European history made the travesty of the likeness apparent.
Cultural critiques of this type were supplemented, in subsequent decades, by indigenous applications of political economy to an understanding of colonialism. Political economy, learnt from British education, was again turned into a trenchant critique of colonial economic exploitation.17 Radical political economy showed a second type of internal limitation to the re-enactment thesis. Although it fell short of a fully worked out theory of imperialism, it showed how the faults of the colonial economic process were systemic, persistently long term, and therefore hardly reducible to the greed of individuals, the failure of administration, or the notorious venality of the lower orders of bureaucracy staffed primarily by native officials.
It was gradually recognized that a third kind of response was required, one of breaking away from the embarrassing dichotomy of the early years, of simple acceptance or rejection. Significantly, it was appreciated that the major question was not one involving the relation between British colonialism and India, but rather one of fashioning an adequate theoretical response to the historical phenomenon of modernity. Accordingly, the focus of historical reflection would shift from the British empire to the civilization of modernity as a whole. And this critique of modernity coincided with a self-understanding that became eventually nationalist in the full sense of the term.
Undermining the intellectual legitimacy of colonial power is certainly a necessary constituent of nationalism, but this cannot by itself constitute a mature nationalist ideology. Nationalist ideas are directed against a foreign occupying power, but in order to be fully nationalist they must also have a more positive directedness towards a conception of what the nation is. Would it not be strange to characterize ‘nationalist’ a form of consciousness which has yet to decide what it is to be its nation? The worship of a nation, its semi-religious ardour, cannot be produced by an entirely negative critique of imperialism's political economy.
The sentiments, emotions, symbolic political acts and, finally, the pressure of its popular movements must be directed politically at an object—the territory and its people—through various contingent and complex processes, ultimately constituted by their collective imagination as the nation. Nationalism is an intensely poetic and dramatic affair, and at the heart of its historical initiatives stand the acts of an entire people, or acts initiated on their behalf. All national movements eventually conceal the provisionality and contingency of the process by which this people is formed in historical imagination; historical research, however, shows precisely their contingency, provisionality, and teaches us to be anxious about their fragile and reversible destiny.
Bankimchandra's work reveals the hesitations, false starts, and misrecognitions of the self which accompanied this unaccustomed business of thinking into existence a new collective self. Although he undoubtedly contributes powerfully to the fashioning of the shape of the Indian nationalist consciousness, his work shows three different solutions to the same question: who are the we that intellectuals speak on behalf of, and, paramountly, who are this ‘we’ who should oppose colonial rule?
The first answer was that this collective self was the Bengali ‘ jati’ led by its natural leaders, the educated bhadralok; in another version, after he lost faith in this collaborationist class, this jati was to be led by exemplary leaders emerging from the masses. His second answer, which negates the Bengali identity and looks for something much larger and more powerful, tends towards the Hindu jati. A third solution is to speak of the ‘bharatiya jati’, a nation of Indians. What is interesting is the possibility of applying the title of jati to all of them, and this indicates not so much a linguistic ambiguity in the writing of someone exceptionally careful in his use of language, as a semantic openness relating to the ambiguity of historical possibility itself.
If the Bengali jati is an unlikely candidate for successful struggle against the might of British imperialism, the search for a viable nation has to look in other directions. Bengalis did not constitute the stuff of a good nation not because they were lacking in sentiments of solidarity, but because they could not provide a credible opposition to the power of the empire. The enormous extent of the British empire, its much-vaunted reach, military power, and technical excellence, required a political bloc that was larger, weightier, and equally massive to take on an equal struggle against its resources. Bengalis were inadequate for such a historical enterprise.
Slowly, Bankimchandra breaks up the boundaries of this Bengali ‘we’, seen either upside down or rightside up, and seeks another configuration of ‘we’ among others who share similar grievances, similar hopes and passions, but who are more likely subjects of defiance against the indignities heaped upon them by colonialism than the spoilt and enfeebled Bengali intelligentsia. Three peoples appeal to him from this angle: the Rajputs, the Sikhs, and the Marathas.
In Bankimchandra's novels, Bengalis are often effortlessly replaced by characters taken from these regions and placed in their histories; though occasionally this pretence breaks down, and despite their distinctly un-Bengali martial prowess these characters continue to behave culturally in disturbingly Bengali ways. A powerful Rajput king observes, with scrupulous regard, the rules of matrimonial negotiation of nineteenth-century Bengali bhadralok (Chatterjee 1964).
There is a problem in this gerrymandering of the boundaries of selfhood or collective identity. True, the Bengali is taught with amazing quickness to say ‘we’ and ‘ours’ about Rajputs, Marathas, and Sikhs, and to include them in his/her references to his/her collective self. And, in this period of the rise of high Bengali culture, they gratuitously assume that the communities so included in the Bengali sentimental embrace would reciprocate this emotion of mutuality. Who indeed would not feel honoured by this Bengali gesture of inclusion?
In some respects this inclusive movement remains ambiguous, indeterminate between two very different constructions. The common thread among these peoples is of course their record of successful defiance against unjust and predatory power, but what is problematic is the identity of this predatory enemy. If taken literally, all these people fought against Muslims, in some cases also against the power of British armies, and Bankimchandra's fiction, for reasons which are only partially stylistic, plays powerfully on the anti-Muslim phase of their history.
These episodes can also be taken symbolically, non-literally, in which case, of course, when he pointed his finger at the Muslim he may have actually meant the British. However, this indicates two other possible ways of conceiving the nation to which Bankimchandra and his audience could belong—the first would be a national identity of Hindus which would treat Muslims as invaders and prevent their assimilation in the nationalist movement. But finally, there was also the last and the most attractive construction of the nation as the mother-land—territorial, bounteous, benign, not discriminating between her Hindu and Muslim sons, and technically, the hymn to this motherland, Vande Mataram, fails to work statistically unless Muslims are included among those who raise their swords in her defence.
Bankimchandra belonged to the pioneering generation of nationalism, which means that the decision they found so hard to take, which caused so much agonized reflection, becomes routine for people who follow them. The decision it took them such a long time to take—in favour of a territorial nation—became decisively entrenched in later nationalist thought. Subsequently, when histories of Indian nationalist thought were written, Bankimchandra's generation was seen, correctly in its own way, as the founding generation of this nationalist tradition, erasing from this narrative all the hesitation, tentativeness, and anxiety which surrounded that choice. History is after all the story of what happened, and not of possibilities which came close to happening but did not.
Bankimchandra, along with his generation, thus illustrates the necessity of the distinction I advocate, namely, that between a mere anti-colonial consciousness and a properly nationalist one. I am arguing that the second can appear only when a particular identity for the nation has been chosen and has been met, due to a host of circumstances, with general popular sanction. Thus it showed the strong connection that the making of history has with thinking about history.
The nation in this period is literally a construction, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983); and, in constituting this community through this founding imagination, history, in its popular form, as an irreducible mixture of facts and fantasy (res factae and res fictae), plays a crucial part. There appears to exist a necessary inversion in nationalist historical discourse: ordinary popular consciousness regards this search for history as a search for the past narrative of a community, already constituted, that has existed before and independently of this narrative and can, in principle, exist independently of this storytelling. In reality, however, stories are not such negligible things. It is by telling these stories, by this construction of the past that this community, in exactly this shape and form, comes into existence. It is partly this narrative consciousness that determines the being of a nation.
This storytelling about a collective self represents an important contribution to the making of a nationalist mentality, an act of imagining, of conceiving things narratively in a radically different way. In earlier phases of colonial history, the defiance of Tipu, of the Marathas, or the princes of the north had happened as different, distinct struggles of political principalities and their often selfish rulers against equally selfish British expansionism.
When such desperate struggles were actually under way, the Bengali babu was contentedly enjoying the comforts of colonial subalternity. The trickle-down from British expansion for his class was not inconsiderable. In the 1860s and 1870s his gradual alienation from the British creates a new imaginative order which does not lead to political protest, but in a way of seeing earlier struggles as a single unfolding process of defiance. He appropriates other struggles and gives them a new meaning by fitting them into a new configuration. Struggles of Mysore, Marathas, Sikhs, and the northern royalty, carried on severally and without mutual recognition, were united in history books and novels, and eventually in the more intangible and powerful popular imagination.
Gradually, these are turned into a single process called and recognized as Indian history rather than (regrettably) separately regional or dynastic chronicles. The common element is the common denominator of negative presence of the British in all these stories—the common cause of the ruin of Tipu in the south, the Mughals in the north, and above all the undeserved neglect of the meritorious bhadralok in the east. The deprivations and injustices which they suffered, viewed from close quarters, were quite significantly different. Yet the fact that these were all due to the British gave these grievances ·a tangible character of commonness and formed the narrative mould of a most powerful sentiment.
The advent of the Congress represents the next stage in the evolution of nationalist discourse. Indeed, the origin of the Congress is itself brought about by the cultural changes which took place in the mid-colonial period. The assertion of regional vernacular cultures was accompanied by the deep divide in the earlier more homogeneous cultures in which both traditional elites and subalterns participated in different ways.
This change can be illustrated by referring to elementary social practices. Formerly, both the learned Brahmin and the illiterate peasant performed puja, though in admittedly different styles, but they were bound together by a bond of intelligibility. Such a bond would be conspicuously missed in the case of a modern atheistic babu and the illiterate peasant. While the earlier situation was unequal and the practices were mutually intelligible, the latter case is one of inequality without such intelligibility.
The creation of a new class of Western-educated intelligentsia, assisted by the bounty of the colonial dispensation, which enabled them to acquire substantial economic assets apart from cultural dominance, altered the terrain of political discourse in basic ways. Increasingly, the new elite deserts the indigenous subaltern classes, forswears any kinship with them, turning historically into leaders without a following. Their isolation forces them to assume an increasingly mendicant posture towards the colonial authorities in the hope that the injustices of colonial political economy would be rectified by the unassisted power of rational arguments. They shared their discursive common sense with the British rulers, and they wished accordingly to rectify colonial suffering by shaming the British into adopting appropriate policies of reform.
Popular rebellions against British rule, not surprisingly, assume more pronouncedly folk, popular character, deriving their active leadership either from traditional elites ruined by colonialism or from among themselves—with the obvious disadvantage that the relatively narrow frontiers of regional consciousness proved to be the natural frontiers of their rebellions. As they often did not understand the scale and intricacy of the colonial structure well enough, and failed to build large-enough coalitions, the administration put them down with relative ease.
Tilak already represented a change in this fatal bifurcation in anti-colonial discontent and showed a distinct petty bourgeois admiration for popular protests. But, it was Gandhi and his peculiar discourse which achieved a recombination of these increasingly diverging trends of anti-colonial dissent. His manner of achieving this is significant for an understanding of the subsequent trajectory of independent India, and has to be analysed with care.
Gandhi solved this problem of a disrupted, divided political inheritance with unprecedented originality. The difference between high and low culture, as has already been pointed out, was no new thing in Indian history; but the new distinction was not between high and low in the same register; rather, it became two incommensurable registers resisting mutual translation. Ideas of political reasonableness were being cut up in two. Resistance, under these conditions, had little chance of attaining really threatening social depth or spatial spread. Elite dissatisfaction spread thinly across India, but had little popular support. Popular defiance, occasional and intense, was usually restricted to small regions. It was easy for the colonial order to ignore the first and suppress the second.
To put the argument schematically, Gandhi gradually forged a new configuration of nationalism which, because of its carefully crafted semiotic dualism, could be considered reasonable from both orbits of discourse. An analysis of Gandhi's trial would reveal how carefully he arranged this double intelligibility of his political acts. What he said and did against the colonial state, in the full publicity of its courts in 1922, made sense in two different ways, but each way of making sense would have made little sense to the other.
Gandhi's acts at this trial could be read off without mystification or residue by the two different discourses about the political world. Politics could be seen as something absolutely central to the constitution of society, and this arena conceived as a field of instrumental and strategic action. Alternatively, the state could be seen, extending a traditional Indian mode of thinking, as something grand, spectacular, but distant; a far-off cause of much suffering but normally unamenable to the initiatives of ordinary men and women. Great men and women could occasionally arise and right its wrongs for some time, and they deserved support because they took on this great cause on behalf of the wretched and the inarticulate of the earth.
Acts that Gandhi undertook could make sense in terms of both conceptions of politics. The modernist intelligentsia could see in them the work of a shrewd colonial lawyer who carefully chose the terrain, the occasion, and the exact legal point of his struggle against British colonial legality, who posed to that legal system problems especially difficult to solve.18 He could do so precisely because he knew that system inside out, and, as the unfortunate judge found to his profound discomfiture, he offered for judgement a curious mixture of compliance and defiance.19
The element of defiance made it dangerous for the colonial state to let his behaviour go unpunished; the accompanying aspect of meekness, non-violence, and acquiescence in legal penalties made it risky to punish it too harshly. That might incense Indian subjects and fail to be intelligible to public opinion at home, under the scrutiny of which all acts of the colonial administration were brought. A reading of this kind, evidently plausible, would fall within the circle of modernist discourse—with a typically instrumental rationalist conception of the state, which reckoned by means of ideas such as political objectives, rational calculation of means, interests of individuals and groups, strategy, tactics, advance, retreat, manoeuvre.
Gandhi's defiance and its constitutive gestures could also be read in a radically different way. To ordinary Indian peasants, accustomed to the age-old experience of the irresistibility of state injustice and the ineffectiveness of the rhetoric of resistance except as a miracle, he appeared in a miraculous, already mythical light. He appeared as a Mahatma or gratuitous redeemer of the world's suffering, who had no earthly personal reason to enter this contest, but who had the courage, precisely the mark of the saint, to take the sufferings of ordinary mankind upon himself, and to suffer the indignities of others. Moderns would view him in a frame of the linear temporality of an unknown but hopeful future; a future which would be newly fashioned, which would be better than the inglorious past, because history is demystified to them and is seen as the sum of the conscious and deliberate acts of human individuals.
Peasants would often think they knew better, and treated such modernist futures with cynicism. For them he came in the frame of a traditional, intolerably long cyclical temporality, of endless cycles of eternal injustice and occasional relief that was miraculous, after which life was likely to settle back into the familiar tedious pattern of iniquity and suppression. Gandhi was the typical doer of the miraculous act which was at the same time both new and ancient, which happened only rarely, but was known to have happened earlier too in the lives of similar yet different saints in times of similar yet different darkness.20 Although it had happened earlier, each time it took place again it had the sparkle, the newness of a miraculous deliverance. Thus, Gandhi's politics could be seen transparently from either side, but each side saw a different thing.
Gandhi's politics was dualist in a further sense. He reached his two audiences through the use of two separate registers of communication and persuasion. Gandhi wrote a great deal, for the middle class's medium of politics was language in all its wordiness. A politician was known only by his/her words—speeches, articles, books, interviews, promises, retractions, prevarications, ambiguity, arguments—the whole intellectualist conception of a world approached primarily through words. To the majority of their illiterate countrymen and country-women the world of words, especially the written word, represented something wholly different, a world of denial, of disenfranchisement and hiding.
Words, when written, appeared to the peasant—used to the mendacity of the usurer and mahajan, the connivance of the petty official, deviously silent—a taking away of language rather than a giving, more akin to a conspiracy than to a universal and popular consultation. Spoken language, when it was not legally arcane or intellectually pedantic, was better, for it restored through the medium of mass meetings and political conversation some of the universality of languages. Even spoken language failed to cross other, more fundamental, barriers—when these were constituted not by natural but by conceptual languages.
Gandhi, unlike other politicians, circumvented this difficulty with the aid of two instrumentalities. Gandhi himself as the individual politician resorted to the use of other elements in the complex and wide semiotic register available in rural India; this included the symbolism of a whole range of non-discursive and non-modern ways of making meaning—from prayers to silences to dress to food, which for all their non-wordiness represented ideas and persuaded people by techniques that had been deployed for their persuasion for centuries. This, of course, appeared strangely retrograde and perverse to modernists of all types, but the strident criticism made against these elements of Gandhi's politics missed the point that what was significant in them was not their content but the semiotic form.
Besides this personal solution, the national movement solved the problem of the two circles of common sense by a different technique of translation. The structure of the discourse of nationalism, in its mature phase, crucially depended on a diglossia. Élites which gained political influence in different regions came together and formed an all-India coalition on the basis of a bilingual pattern of communication, speaking and writing in their regional vernaculars and in English. Partly, this made for a minimal translation of ideas from one circle of discourse to another. It is a major part of my argument that this essential diglossia is being destroyed in current Indian culture and is being replaced by exacerbating clashes between unilingual and English-using elite and equally unilingual but much less quiescent speakers of regional languages.
Despite his political successes, Gandhi's cultural achievement was limited. He did not create a single common sense out of the two conceptual languages which emerged in Indian culture through colonialism. His own style was too personal, too idiosyncratic, to form a structural base for a new, truly common ‘common sense’ which could become a part of the foundation of an independent Indian state. He remained more a hinge between the two discourses rather than became the creator of a culture of mutual translation.
In the history of Indian nationalism, Gandhi occupies a strange and paradoxical place. It is a matter of some surprise how a trend politically so central can be culturally so insignificant: while the movement was contesting the power of the British, Gandhi remained its central figure; after Independence, in the serious business of constitution-framing, adherents of his ideas caused amused and embarrassed comment. To put it somewhat differently, Gandhi the political leader won the unstinted adherence of a large majority of the nationalist leadership, but his thought failed to gain a similar influence, let alone dominance.
From the mid-1930s, Congress nationalism came to be affected by a new emphasis on social radicalism. Its popular support was unevenly spread across the regions of Congress dominance, but its moral critique of the indifference of earlier nationalism to questions of poverty and social justice was successful in introducing a certain tone of concern. It is not easy to gauge the consequences of this radical intervention in nationalist ideology: while it obliged everyone to speak of poverty and backwardness in a caring tone, perhaps it also taught politicians to indulge in rhetoric not seriously meant.
Radical nationalism had several different, regionally influential forms; but radicals constituted a fractious and unstable group incapable of working out coalitions among themselves, and therefore unable to realize the full effect of their weight. They never came to wield the influence they could have exercised had they stayed together. Mutual recrimination and fractious squabbling reduced each segment to ignoble compromises with ideological adversaries.
Communists pulled along in isolation, and their utter friendlessness in the ‘peoples’ war’ phase imposed some curious decisions on them, making them appear to those less internationally inclined as untrustworthy collaborators with the colonial power. Socialists, left isolated in their turn by their visceral disapproval of communists and by communist isolationism, eventually came to find ironic solidarity with chauvinistic groups. Nehru, himself a part of the left, remained always variously estranged from the two other streams, and consequently helplessly dependent on Gandhi, and consigned his frustrations to the pages of his autobiography.
If we consider socialist ideology from the point of view of the attitude towards modernity of these different groups, a large measure of unanimity emerges despite some differences. They turned the problem that modernity had posed to earlier nationalists by means of a simple device. Marxism sensitized them particularly to the historicity of theoretical and practical forms; radicals thus refused to consider European modernity as a homogeneous process. Compared to their early nationalist forbears, they understood its internal stratifications, contradictions, oppositions. The radical theory of history, upon which all of them drew, emerged from the underside of modernity, from the side of its disprivilege and denial, its internal other; and, as Leninist theory emphasized, there was a natural connection of perceptions of history and collective interest between the internal other of modernity and its external other, the metropolitan proletariat and colonial peoples.
Following this tradition, radical nationalism effected a restructuring of the earlier dispute between Westernism and indigenism. Radical nationalism was primarily modernist. It accepted the universality of rationalist social thought, the idea that any human being was a potential utterer of its truths. It decided to take this offer of universalism implicit in Western rationalism literally at its word, and argued forcefully for enfranchisement within human reason of the dispossessed both in capitalist societies and in colonial countries.
Colonial radicals saw in this the opportunity of creating a new theory of potential re-enactment of European modernity. Socialism, i.e. modernity purged of its capitalist form, was universalizable. This time, it was not to be a fraudulent re-enactment under the aegis of colonial powers; rather, colonialism had itself become an obstacle to the re-enactment process. Once colonial power was removed, this re-enactment of modernity would become feasible at last.
The political thinking of late nationalism showed a renewed vigour of theoretical imitativeness, Leftists declaring as their major undertaking not the invention of a social theory, but an ‘application’, in the strictly imitative sense of this term, of their preferred radical doctrine—Jayaprakash Narayan and the communists, a version of Marxism; and Nehru, after an initial adherence to that, veering as he came close to his tryst with prime ministerial destiny, towards a British Labour version of parliamentary social democracy. And since, by a combination of political necessity and pure fortuitousness, the large section of the elite following Nehru came to control the apparatus of government after freedom, this specific theory was translated into the historical agenda of reconstruction of the new Indian state.
The strand of nationalism associated with Nehru has come under heavy and unrelenting criticism, partly an understandable cross borne by any political ideology that has won power; others can always criticize it from their position of ineffectual innocence. It would be interesting to undertake an initial classification of these criticisms, because these stem from extremely diverse grounds. However, as a preliminary classification, we must also distinguish between the genuine articles of the pattern of thinking associated with Nehru and a fraudulent extension of it that sought patronage and privilege in its name during Indira Gandhi's days in undisputed power.
Nehru's design, unlike its fraudulent successor, consisted of a serious proposal for the construction of a European-style social democracy under economic conditions of extreme backwardness and political conditions prevailing in the aftermath of nationalist mobilization. Two of its central theses have received a great deal of critical attention, and need simply to be mentioned here.
1. With nearly all other views of development of its time, it shared an excessively economistic conception of the idea of development, reducing all other elements in it to the status of corollaries. Ironically, it appears in retrospect that the relative successes of its economic plans are in danger of being erased due to its negligence of cultural reproduction processes.
2. Another central weakness of this design, which it partly shared with Soviet models of growth, stemmed from its tendency to rely too heavily on the instrumentality of the state, and to suffocate non-state institutions of civil society by theoretically equating the principle of public good with the institutional form of state control.
It negligently disregarded the possibility that state institutions could be effectively ‘privatized’ in particularly hideous forms, and become vehicles of private and sectional interests of a malignantly pre-bourgeois nature. This was particularly likely in India, given the great richness and variety of its long tradition of political tyranny of all kinds. The privatization of the benefits of the state—an institution which was supposed to counteract the injustices of the market—generated its own, even less accountable iniquities, and, additionally, made criticism of it even more problematic because of the equation of its ravages with the operation of the principles of social justice. But I shall confine my remarks to some other features of the form of nationalist thinking which carried Nehru's imprimatur.
Whatever the weaknesses of the productive and distributive principles of the Nehru model, it was generally assumed that its cultural programme (or rather, its lack of one) was quite adequate for the historical tasks that the nation faced. This nationalism was given implicit acquiescence even by its leftist critics, as it was assumed that it provided a secular base for the Indian nation state. I think this can hardly be taken for granted, and shall offer some critical arguments.
It can be argued that there is a strong connection between an ideology and a way of creating a narrative of the historical record, as these are crucial elements in reducing the threatening chaos of the social world in which people live into the reassuring form of an order. In this again, one significant element is how its own history, its historical self-description, is fitted into the larger narrative of world history that it wishes to tell. As this history is essentially political in character, its attraction lies not in its constancy but in its ability to adapt its structure to the political requirements of changing circumstances.
This will become clear if we compare the different stories that the Congress had told about itself during three stages of its career. In the actual course of the nationalist movement, Congress often faced strong competition from contending forms of nationalism: e.g. terrorist nationalism, the communists, or even Subhas Chandra Bose's Forward Bloc. Contemporary historical accounts of the Congress movement reflected such political strains; and consequently, its historians did not see these trends as part of itself separated by a regrettable but temporary misunderstanding; on the contrary, they often attempted to condemn these trends as anti-national simply because their construction of what nationalism was tended to be different from the Congress's.21
After Independence, there was a discernible shift in this political narration. Earlier on, the line of division between the Congress and other trends of nationalist politics used to be drawn with great sharpness; official histories written immediately after freedom, in the warm afterglow of victory, tended to blur such divisions. In the massive history by Tara Chand (1961–72), for instance, a significant rewriting takes place: anti-Congress trends are not distanced with aversion and mistrust; rather the allegiance that they enjoyed among dissenting groups is sought to be assimilated into the ideology of a triumphant Congress: a kind of retrospective generosity is extended to them in their new portrayal, and the sharp differences and controversies that actually erupted between them are played down.
Nationalist discourse thus produced, through its varying channels—school textbooks, official propaganda, the media, the ceremonies of remembrance, the symbolic sequence of holidays—a really composite pantheon of national leaders, not in an attempt to restore to this phase of Indian history its actual baffling diversity, but to appropriate them into a predominantly Congress past. The story of the national movement as a whole is slowly assimilated into the history of the Congress.
This history of history-writing is a matter of some significance for Indian politics and its relation with culture. By the 1970s, with Indira Gandhi's use of a more radical nationalist posture, the political requirement of nationalist ideology altered substantially. It was now useful to claim the heritage of the entire national movement as a pre-history of the Congress as refashioned by Indira Gandhi's distinctive new slogans.
Accordingly, there was renewed revision of the history of the nationalist movement. The definition of nationalism was narrowed down to fit a strictly ‘Nehruvian’ vision of what Indian nationalism was, with a strong emphasis on secularism, socialism, the extension of principles of liberal equality towards social democracy.22 There is no doubt, of course, that if it were open to choose our past, this is what we would like to choose; this is the sort of nationalism that many of us would have preferred.
Analytically, it is of signal importance that the nationalism of our preference is not confused with the nationalism that really existed, which was certainly less secular, less inclined towards social justice, and was often unenthusiastic about the observance of basic democratic practices. However, this was not a conflation that accidentally erupted in academic history at a particular point; rather, its picture of the past chimed in perfectly with the temporary cadence of Congress ideology under Indira Gandhi.
It differentiated itself from other trends in nationalism in today's India and served several ideological purposes.
1. It portrayed itself as the sole heir of the heritage of the national movement.
2. It condemned other trends as either communal or conservative and, therefore, by definition anti-national.
3. By claiming that Indian nationalism had fought for the realization of the principles that Indira Gandhi (as it turned out, inconstantly) espoused, it sought to prevent its political opponents appealing to that fund of regard that an ordinary Indian had for this common nationalist historical legacy.
It can be argued that the original narrative of history, though less simplistic and less self-interested, contained massive misrepresentations of India's cultural history. Acceptance of the paradigmatic European models of nation-formation revealed how crucial the cultural unification process was for a nation. Given this model (if, in other words, this was regarded not as one type of nation-formation but its only possible, and therefore universal, form), it would appear embarrassing to admit that India was not a nation that was already formed culturally and merely waiting to be emancipated from British rule. It was still more embarrassing to acknowledge that, in strange and ironic ways, British rule created the preconditions for this nationalism by imposing systems of common suffering and common living under the colonial order.
It was politically more uplifting for the nationalist leadership to assert that this nation of India was formed by a cultural process which went back into immemorial antiquity. Nationalist ideology thus projected an exaggerated argument about India's ‘composite culture’, which was in the nature of a hopeful abstraction rather than a belief supported by a detailed and serious enquiry into India's cultural past. This encouraged a massive pretence on the part of the national movement and later by the national state that the question of cultural construction of the nation was left behind in the past, rather than lying still in the future. It made Indians believe that the imagining of the nation was an accomplished and irreversible fact; it did not have to be constantly presented and justified. Anyone who did not take the Indian nation for granted must be in clandestine collusion with forces opposed to India's national freedom. By encouraging this cultural default, the narrative of Indian nationalism (spawned by adherents of Nehru's vision) is partly to blame for the politico-cultural crisis that India's state order is facing today.
I would like to make a brief remark about social theory here. Colonialism and nationalism, each in its own way, placed the agenda of modernity firmly at the centre of Indian politics. Nationalism, as Gellner points out in his incisive if somewhat one-sided study, has an inextricable connection with the enterprise of modernity in the history of the West. Although its relation with modernity is more complex in the case of colonial societies, in the case of Indian nationalism this relation with aspiration towards modernity is clearly evident.23 Nehru's nationalism viewed colonialism as the main obstacle to India's path towards a Westernized scientific modernity; therefore, in a paradox, removal of European power was the precondition for successful emulation of European history.
This strand of nationalism prided itself on its theoretical self-awareness, the central characteristic of its theory being the celebration of modernity. Yet, on reflection, there was an immense difference between the way emergent modernity appeared to the most intelligent and perspicacious observers in Europe in the nineteenth century,24 and the way it appeared to its distant worshippers after the lapse of a century.
All major social theory in Europe emerged out of a cognitive struggle with a sense of bewilderment in the face of modern history: Marx's theory of capitalism, de Tocqueville's of democracy, and Weber's of secularism. Modernity, to those who lived through its first phase, seemed the most difficult word to understand and bring under social control. To the Asian modernists, modernity seemed attractive precisely because it posed no Hegelian riddle, it held no Rousseauesque terrors, nor did it require the massive Marxist intellectual enterprise of knowing history. Modernity was simplicity itself, a simple conflict between superstition and knowledge, error and science, in which, moreover, a benign history had arranged victory for science and truth in advance.
Koselleck (1985) has argued that modernity changed the human conception of the future in a new structure of temporal consciousness. Formerly, the future held no fears entirely different from the sufferings of the present, because, it was believed, as Machiavelli put it, ‘men will live and die in order for ever to remain the same’ (1970: 142).25 Modernity destroyed this assurance of continuity and faced human beings for the first time with a future of a radical newness which deeply troubled conservatives and delighted revolutionaries.
As Arendt's (1970) work showed, the concept of revolution in its new linear sense was deeply connected with this novel concept of the future, coming to stand, in a strange etymological reversal, for exactly the opposite of what it literally denoted (Arendt 1970: especially 42ff.). History did not foreshadow the return of inevitable old patterns with minor variations, but the creation by human endeavour of unprecedented conditions—of states of political freedom, justice, and public happiness never conceived of before. It was not missed by some who observed the rise of this new politics of modernity that this new future contained equal dangers—unprecedented terrors for which there were no precedents of either preparation or prevention.
This new conception of the future altered the nature of historical knowledge, or its judicious use. History in the old sense became redundant at one stroke, lines of events would not be the same, the future could not be understood by studying the past. A new kind of knowledge of history had to take its place: it was a knowledge of processes, not learning about events. Rational social theory was to take over the function of explanation from earlier historical scholarship. Most of these theorists believed that it was possible, despite unprecedented complexity, to live in history with a form of prospective rationality. Social theory was supposed to provide this indispensable implement of living rationally under conditions of modernity. But, it could do so only by giving up the myth of re-enactments: the future was uncertain but still not unmasterable. People must not expect the past to be replayed in the future.
Modernity places the Indian in a similar historical position; yet the modernists’ reading of his/her historical placement is radically different. While the actual problem with modernity is its ever-recurring unprecedentedness—that is, other peoples’ modernity cannot entirely show the picture of our future—the modernist believes that its main attraction lies in the fact that it, in a manner of speaking, lets us into history's secret; through the European past, we know the script in advance. With the fading of this optimism, a new series of questions arises insistently: the specific ways in which capitalist production emerges in these societies, the peculiar twists of their democratic process. Is modernity ineluctable? Is it divisible? Can its inexorable logic be bent to the demands of rational, critical, equitable control?
These questions themselves pose the problem of the nature and configuration of historical knowledge in interesting ways. Historical knowledge in this context is always a knowledge of processes, not learning about the sequence of incidents but of the logic of structures. This would not mean looking at incidents in European history as precedents, and waiting like M.N. Roy for the arrival of our French or Russian revolution or Renaissance. This does not mean, on the other hand, giving up reading Europe's history, as chauvinist indigenism would advocate. For there is no other place to analyse the processes of modernity except in the historical annals of the West, and processes happen through events. Only in this way can we finally break out of the strange sentimentality of the relationship with Europe's history that lay at the heart of our nationalist discourse. Like de Tocqueville's description of American history, what we face today is unprecedented, but not unmasterable. Like him, in India, we also live in an age in which the past has ceased to throw light on the future. And we too face a new kind of undetermined time.
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First published in T.V. Sathyamurthy, ed., Social Change and Political Discourse in India, vol. 1: State and Nation in the Context of Social Change (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 298–335.
1 R.P. Dutt's India Today (1940) is a representative example of such alternative history. I think it is wrong to deny that this constituted an alternative historiography, but at the same time this is not the only way or only valuable or sensible way of writing one. Indeed, any idea of a single alternative history which would replace all the evils, errors, biases, and blindnesses of others is a suspect ideal, based on a simplistic understanding of the historicity of history writing.
2 The work of the Subaltern Studies group is significant because they have undertaken a task of this kind.
3 Some early nationalists saw the cultural process as vital. Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, writing in Bengali, presented a popular version of the drain theory; but added to it a trenchant critique of colonial ideology and culture that was his own.
4 In much of the discussion about modernizing initiatives and consequences of colonialism, the dichotomy between traditional and modern is automatically joined to the opposition between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft derived from Tönnies.
5 The following section restates a distinction I have used in Kaviraj 1992.
6 My use of the term ‘fuzzy’ is not meant to indicate imprecision, only a different way of being precise. Although the argument is quite different from my own, see Bose (1989) for an analysis of the complexity of identity ordering in India.
7 The diagram in its basic design is based on an argument similar to the argument about agrarian societies in Gellner (1983).
8 This process is sketched in somewhat greater detail in Kaviraj 1992.
9 For a discussion of the Oriya case, see Mohanty 1982.
10 The forms of religious identity commonly termed communalism in India are modern identities of religion, and, therefore, products of the modern instead of the traditional world.
11 I read Gramsci's conception of subalternity as indicating this complex mixture of a proneness to dissent and an inability to set agendas.
12 Cohn 1987 contains a pioneering analysis of the social consequences of the census.
13 Joshi (1975) contains some early contributions to a revisionist history of nationalism. See especially Sarkar 1975 and Sen 1975.
14 The political intent behind this move is clear: this would take away any legitimacy that communal forces in present-day India can claim as inheritors of the Indian nationalist tradition.
15 Bankimchandra's political essays furnish good examples on both these counts; he was much concerned with a critique of utilitarian ideas which he called ‘the philosophy of the belly’, and yet he agonized over the rights of indigenous tyrants, and foreign reformers (Chatterjee 1965: 54ff).
16 The great text of this critique is Bankimchandra's satirical work Kamalakanta and Lok Rahasya. Unfortunately, in most discussions the focus is exclusively on his novel Anandamath.
17 The classics of this tradition were Naoroji 1901 and Dutt 1960.
18 Consider, in particular, his handling of the judge in his 1922 trial.
19 Gandhi pleaded guilty, and indeed went on to claim that he had gone much further in treason than the prosecution had maintained in its official charge.
20 For an excellent account of how the popular image of Gandhi was formed, see Amin 1984.
21 A clear example of such conflict can be found in the common treatment of the Communist decision to support the British war effort in 1942, against the nationalist call to quit India.
22 I suspect that the canonical Nehruism of the 1970s was significantly different from Nehru's own ideological stance on several points: (i) Nehru, in his later writing, was far less enthusiastic about Marxist theory, and took great pains to stress that what he called socialism should never be confused with any version of Soviet communism; (ii) Nehru was far more scrupulous about the observance of democratic norms, despite admittedly glaring lapses. It is doubtful if he would have seen bourgeois democratic norms as obstacles to imminent social change, and rejoiced in their demolition during the Emergency. The ‘Nehruvians’ belatedly recognized the value of democratic norms when the Emergency caught up with them. But, despite their retrospective repentance, it should not be forgotten that this group provided the ideological justification for Indira Gandhi's destruction of constitutional controls over executive authority, probably in the expectation that they would be the secondary or tertiary beneficiaries of this concentration of power. Their motive for a self-serving invocation of Nehru's name is of course transparent; but to credit that with the badge of ‘Nehruism’ is to be unfair to Nehru.
23 It would be absurd to deny that substantial parts of the Indian national movement looked at the proposals of modernity with deep mistrust and moral repugnance. However, the general ideological tenor of the movement and certainly the ideology of the nation-state was decidedly modernist. For an interesting classification of trends of nationalist thought, see Parekh 1989: 11–70.
24 Some of the major theorists of this modernity—de Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber—showed a deeply critical and mistrustful attitude to the concept.
25 Discourses of Livy (Discourse II, ‘Concerning the Religion of the Romans’).
