The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas

To think of possible indignity to a land composed of mountains, forests, and rivers, this essay argues, is not a natural thing. Conceiving of nature as having a life similar to human beings and as being the object of emotions is a historical fact—something that happens when the modern emotion named nationalism appears in societies. It is under very specific cultural circumstances that such emotions can be projected on to the natural world, or indeed the natural world can be seen as a singular entity to which the entire apparatus of human emotions can be applied. The ideology called nationalism engendered unknown forms of affection—for unprecedented and abstract things.¹

Although it goes strongly against our intuition to admit this, emotions are historical. This is especially true of public emotions like patriotism. People use a language of emotions meant for natural communities like the family, and kinship for an abstract modern association with the nation. Here I want to argue that an emotion like patriotism (which is a deeply ironical misnomer for any Bengali and shows the inescapable slippages of writing in English, because a Bengali can, strictly speaking, only be ‘matriotic’) does not come naturally. People living in a space, in a territory, and in nature may universally admire the bounty of the world around them, but that does not amount to feeling the specific emotion called modern patriotism. Yet, the fact that it is historical does not make it, in Gellner’s sense, fraudulent. Rather, this raises a question central to the work of modern historians of nationalism on the precise meaning of the historicity of nationalism. Historicity, strictly speaking, is a two-sided, somewhat paradoxical notion: to suggest that something is historical is to suggest that it draws upon the past; yet, it also suggests that it is something that emerged at a particular and specifiable time, and did not exist before.

The literature on nationalism has struggled with this conceptual problem. Is there a previously established ethic, which acquires, under the pressures of modern history, a new kind of self-valuing consciousness? Or does the response to a sense of political indignity associated with foreign occupation bring forth a new sense of identity where none existed before? Is the identity old but the sentiment new? Or is the identity itself forged by a new configuration of history, leaving us with no possibility except to treat the sentiment towards this new object as unprecedented? There is no necessary reason why there must be an invariant, general answer to this question. Here I offer an answer that is parochially valid, correct for the Bengali, and presumably by extension for the Indian case. Recognition of objects in the social world requires the prior existence of a language crafted to capture precisely those objects. A nation can begin to exist when both a descriptive and an evaluative language for it has been fashioned. It would be an inaccurate historical representation to say that authors created a language of veneration for a nation that already existed pre-linguistically. In fact, it is the forming of a language of emotion regarding the nation—in this case, the symbolic figure of the land-mother—that makes the descriptive figure of the nation imaginatively visible. I argue that the creation of a language appropriate for the expression of this new emotion, both linguistically and iconically, required a great deal experimentation; and that, even when it was consolidated in the period of high nationalism, there was always potential for instability in this image. There were significant variations in what people saw as their country, the ways in which they imagined its form, and the exact kind of emotion they felt for it; and these variations were not merely formal—each form determined its political implications. Nationalism is a particularly interesting field for the study of the politics of seeing.

Here I will try to follow the alterations in this reverential language and analyse the techniques by which this was brought about in the case of modern Bengali nationalism. What was the nature of this language before the coming of modernity? What exactly were its resources? Exactly what sort of operation was done on those resources to make them adequate to the demands of a modern, mundane sacredness in a world in which other sacrednesses were slowly fading? I shall try to show how writers and imaginative creativity moved the traditional language of piety and its associated iconography to the modern sacredness of the nation. I hope this will also reveal a central irony of modern nationalism: its state of indecision between on the one hand the demands of a rational calculation of self-interest, and on the other an equally insistent need to constantly appeal to something not based on self-interest at all—an indefeasible community. Modern nations are perpetually uneasily poised between these two, partly contradictory, conceptions of the collective selves.

In purely formal and rational terms it is impossible to induce people to make large sacrifices for the diffuse and uncertain glories of national pride. Conventional arguments of rational choice can be adduced to make the nation still more mysterious. As the objectives of national uplift or eventual freedom from colonial rule are indivisible goods, it is rational for individuals to act as free riders on the sacrifice of others. When India won freedom from British rule, it was impossible to reward with freedom only those who had acted for its achievement, and exclude, for example, those who had worked as British civil servants. When freedom came, all Indians became free, irrespective of whether or not they had supported the freedom struggle. This would appear to have rewarded the free riders particularly well. They enjoyed the benefits of collaboration with the colonial authorities while foreign rule lasted, and shared the freedom of the nation when independence arrived. According to a particularly strong version of such reasoning, this must make the emergence of nationalism particularly problematic.²

Nationalism requires, as a supplement, a language of identity of a particularly excessive kind, by which the motherland is not merely valued but valued above all else. This perception of the unique value of the motherland is matched by the excessive demands for exemplary action in her cause. This transition to action is usually prompted by the emotion of nationalist devotion, which is created, in a quite literal sense, by literary operations on existing symbolic repertoires available to a specific culture. From this point of view, the ‘creation’ of a language of nationalist affection can be seen, to use Ian Hacking’s luminous phrase, as an enquiry into ‘historical ontology’—of a new way of seeing things, and a new way of being among individuals.

A new emotion requires a new language to express it. And it is not an exaggeration to suggest that Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay devised the elementary aspects of this new language in an awkward song placed inside one of his last novels, which enjoyed an extraordinary career in the history of modern Indian culture.³ It is often said that Bankim’s iconography in Vande Mataram is traditionalist and conservative. I find this seriously misleading; the idea can be entertained only if we take a casual and inattentive view of the word and image texts. Any serious attention to the texts of Vande Mataram will show on the contrary that it is a highly innovative composition both in linguistic and iconic terms.

There are two different ways of reading the text of that song, both plausible in their own ways. Its first textuality is within a novelistic, narrative frame: its meaning circumscribed and fixed by what it does for the narrative and its internal fictive characters. It is a song sung by specific figures in the contingent narrative circumstances of that specific story. But the longer and larger history of that song must take account of the process by which it floats free of that narrative frame, and becomes a free-standing song of first Bengali and then Indian patriotism, invoked, like others of that genre, in their characteristic abstractness. That historical fate does something strange to the original story. That story is both erased and multiplied: erased because it does not have to be invoked as a specific manner of acting and being in the world, precisely because it has become generalized for the putative inhabitants of the new nation. It has not been forgotten because its spirit has gone into oblivion, but forgotten because it is taken for granted. The unprecedented sentiment it creates through the contingent events of that story later become the generic atmosphere of a patriotic consciousness. After some time, the song does not need the story any longer, because that story had been written into the silent breathing of that culture; that narrative is forgotten because its spirit has become unforgettable. To work, to convey its meaning, the song does not need the narrative frame.

I wish to tell three stories regarding that song. First, the story of its writing, which is instructive because it shows how innovative the literary composition was. Second, the story of the novel within which the song appears and is sung, the narrative preparation of that bhava. And finally, the story of the song itself as the origin of a free-standing iconic world full of internal figural iconicities of its own, and its deeply ambiguous inheritance.

The first point to note is the feeling of surprise that this song comes from Bankimchandra, one of the most resolutely unpoetic of Bengali writers. After some early misadventures in rhymed poetry, Bankim realized his mistake and never left the more secure poetics of literary prose, which could incorporate some stylistic attractions of poetry in a more controlled form within the capacious powers of prose writing.⁴ In stylistic form, he never strayed into poetry again, except on this utterly memorable occasion. But this breaking into poetry, in a literal sense, is highly significant. It shows a crisis in the narrative, a point where the new emotion of patriotism has reached an unbearable intensity, when its unrecognized and unsuspected cadences become too powerful even for Bankim’s prose, like emotion breaking into tears; this powerful, new, half-recognized, unknown emotion breaks for this first time, in its own celebration, into poetry.⁵

But this first-ever occasion of breaking into poetry was not free of trouble. In formal terms, only the emotion is undeniable, and its irresistible expressive power is tangible; in terms of the crafting of a literary form for it, it was awkward and, in some ways, flawed. Educated Bengalis, cultivated in the literary arts of three languages—Sanskrit, English, and Bengali—were not slow to recognize its formal problems. A younger contemporary and admirer, Haraprasad Sastri, records a revealing incident in his autobiography.⁶ A small group of gifted young writers and admirers used to gather for weekly hearings of the text when Bankim was composing Anandamath. When he read the narrative segment in which the song first appeared, there was stunned silence, not because the highly cultured audience thought the song wonderful, but because they could not bring themselves to believe that Bankim, the greatest writer in the language, could, at the height of his imaginative powers, produce something so replete with infelicities. Their alarm was not unjustified. The song begins with solemn Sanskrit:

Yet after a few stanzas it reaches a point of poetic climax and breaks ungrammatically into Bengali. To his startled audience this appeared not an invention but a slip. The more courageous among them, like Sastri, drew Bankim’s attention to the formal and grammatical awkwardness, because they thought it might expose Bankim, despite his unassailable stature, to ridicule. Bankim, usually more forthcoming in discussion, Sastri tells us, simply said they could not convince him; of course what they said was true, but ‘the song was right’. This is an extraordinary incident, if true, because Bankim was the most rationalistic of writers, never at a loss for providing entirely impeccable and reasoned justification for his beliefs. But here he seemed to have no rational grounding of his conviction, only an inexplicable faith in the song’s rightness in some inexplicable sense.

Obviously, there was a distinction here between what was grammatically and poetically correct. But beyond its poetic propriety, Bankim wished to say that it was politically right. Yet, to say that he needed a language of that politics—and Bankim’s defence of himself remained inarticulate because he could not find that language—to say he was himself only halfway towards making it take form. I think the relation between the Sanskrit and vernacular in the Vande Mataram is similar to the discrepant tone of the last chapter in Machiavelli’s Prince, a fault of form from the point of view of consistency of composition, but a triumph in finding a new linguistic register of an unprecedented emotion. As Federico Chabod asserts, without that last stylistically inconsistent chapter The Prince would not have been The Prince;⁷ without that stanza in Bengali, Vande Mataram, equally, would not have been the song that made history.

We have now become so used to the image of the land-goddess that it is somehow inconceivable to think of a time when this was unknown. The tradition of devotion in Hindu religion has a great variety of goddesses, some of whom bear a maternal-feminine form, but are not the land. It is necessary therefore to see how this particular image is put together from an earlier iconic field. There are two parallel processes of image-making going on in the novel: in the song the image of the mother is being slowly built up in words; but in another scene of the novel a directly iconic image is also built up directly through a play on imagic forms of various Hindu religious sects.

The Mata to whom that song is sung is not entirely an abstract image of words; it is correspondingly portrayed in a visual image of icons. Mahendra, one of the main characters in the narrative, goes down into the underground temple of the santans and is presented with an image of baffling complexity.⁸ Consider the primary form of the icon. It is, first of all, a composite image: the main image was a statue of Vishnu (Bankim’s preferred deity among the large Hindu pantheon), but there is an image of Shakti in his lap. This composition is of course wholly ungrammatical; both Shaktas and Vaishnavas in Bengal would have found worshipping such a composite image doctrinally unacceptable. In the Bengali tradition of iconic composition, there were occasional instances of the combination of Kali and Krishna into an androgynous image, called Krishnakali, using the darkness of complexion and playing on the stark opposition of the two forms—one masculine, the other feminine. But such images were not very common, although there is evidence of imaginative variations being played on the depiction of individual forms like Durga or Kali or Krishna. Thus, although both Vishnu and Kali came from the formal repertoire of image-making, Bankim’s peculiar way of putting them together was highly untraditional. Besides, his construction of this image is not meant as an object for traditional prayer; it is meant specifically for a modern worship of a new object, the motherland, uneasily poised between a metonymy and a metaphor. This is a classic example of ‘writing upon writing’.⁹ Its elements are taken from earlier iconic forms and their language, but its actual figural form is not sanctioned by that pre-existing language: it defies the rules of conventional pre-modern iconic syntax. Yet there cannot be an entirely new language; the new expressions must mould the old language into a new one precisely by the repetitive and insistent use of such ungrammatic vision. To be intelligible, it must carry on with its pretences and semblances of continuity; hence the Sanskrit, hence the literary form of the stotra. But there is, surrounding all this, an unmistakable sense of displacement, a search for something that is really unprecedented, unthinkable, and really ungrammatical—a distinctly secular sacredness.¹⁰

Even in Bankim’s work this expression of a nationalist emotion does not appear suddenly, without some confused prefiguration. Indications of some interesting preparation for these displacements can be found in his earlier work. What Bankim uses for this invocation is the form of the stotra or stava, a classical format of worship that works through exaggeration of a deity’s powers and beneficent disposition. Conventional religious stotras were meant for a specific kind of religious act, for the quiet or noisy worship of the Hindu devotee to his deity, a process marked by an indelible selfishness. A devotee offered the prayer either in the privacy of his worship room, or else the different form of privacy of the silence of a river at dawn, to his personal God. Occasionally, Hindus would worship together in a temple, where many devotees would chant a common prayer, but each was offering his own deeply individual application for mercy and compassion. So the collective, to use Marx’s contemptuous phrase, was a sack of devout potatoes, not a political community. Nor did it possess a conception of itself with any form of collective agency. Bankim wished to create a song that would be entirely different from this traditional stava, in its literary, formal, point; a song in which the enunciation would not be by discrete individuals, but instead where the invisible lines of separation amongst the tiny circles of their single destinies were erased, enabling them to see themselves as collective makers of a single enunciation. To accomplish this, the song must have a character such that its words would become futile were they not spoken with this new, unknown, unfamiliar, exhilarating togetherness. In this sense, the traditional stotra was essentially personal, the political anthem equally essentially collective.

I have argued elsewhere that, paradoxically, literary humour had a role in creating the artistic space for this intense solemnity.¹¹ Humour creates an undermining effect; and any literary form that is subjected to humorous treatment is partly subverted. In Bankim’s case, oddly, a humorous device accustoms the audience to the possibility of play, of using a form for purposes other than conventional ones. There is a formal, poetic preparation for such a displacement of the stotra form in one of Bankim’s humorous essays in Kamalakanter Daptar. Its protagonist, a destitute Brahmin opium-eater, Kamalakanta, reports a dream. In one of his inspired sequences of dreaming, when essences appear unbidden to his sight, freed by the power of opium from the distractions of everyday life and when he can directly read truth and history, he initially saw a golden idol floating away in the swirling waters of a dark river. On paying attention, he realized that the image and the river were not common images but powerful metaphors. The icon was the image of the goddess Durga on the saptami day, the joyous middle point of the autumn celebration of Durga Puja, golden both as a metaphor of the harvest and of glorious plenty, and of an unspecified national opulence. She was being carried down the streams and waves of an equally metaphorical river—of time, dark because its waters are cognitively impenetrable, and irresistible because there is no point in straining against those currents of time and mortality.¹² Kamalakanta writes one of the most powerful passages of his nationalist construction immediately after evoking this image; and it is also characteristic that, in that piece of writing as well, Bankim’s emotions overpower his writer’s discipline. What is remarkable is that this emotion makes him not only use infelicitous words, most uncharacteristic in someone who habitually shows sedulous attention to rules and grammaticality, but to leave those uneasy words in the printed text. This could only be because he thought that they expressed, despite their ‘faulty’ character, something immensely significant which it would be wrong to erase merely because it was grammatically suspect. Bankim thus sensed that something of immense historical import was happening through his writing, in his text, which he had no power to edit out. This idol was so precious because she was, in his words, navaswapnadarsini, one who made it possible to see new dreams.

After this inspired passage, as is the formal style in Kamalakanta, the writing again lapses into the frivolous and the travestic, but in a significant manner. Kamalakanta begins to invoke the aryastotra, a traditional incantation to goddess Shakti. Curiously, after some proper lines from the canonical composition, he inserts an inimitable mark of his travestic humour: the all-powerful mother is thanked—among others of her proper world-sustaining tasks—with the successful sustenance of Kamalakanta in the midst of the many predicaments of colonial discipline. Kamalakanta is a man without a profession, an income, even a proper and stable address, the essential ingredients of middle-class humanity in a colonial world; and his sheer survival in a world of these omnipotent structures, a fugitive from all its intended disciplines, can only be attributed to the mercy of the omnipotent mother. But the humour, or the irony, is two-sided: while making fun of the regimes of colonial discipline, it also makes fun of the stotra as a form, takes liberties with it by inserting an utterly frivolous line into a high classical text.¹³ I suspect that there is another, more complex operation at work here. By means of this humour, it prises the stotra free of its classical function in traditional sacrality; and as a free-standing form then, a form which retains its sacral character and aura but which is dissociated from its locus in traditional codes of worship, it becomes available for surprising untraditional applications. Only someone who was prepared to take such liberties with traditional forms could put it to more pressing and innovative use.¹⁴

The stotra to the Mother ‘returns’ in an altered form as Vande Mataram, a patriotic song, in Anandamath. Indeed, even the narrative framing of the song is indicative of its newness. It is sung by one of the rebel leaders, Bhavananda, to an astonished Mahendra, who gets more mystified as the lines unfold. After a couple of stanzas, Mahendra expresses his surprise: ‘but this is not my mother, this is my land’; and implicit in this question is the astonishment of the traditional hearer of stotras at the projected transfer of the sentiment of devotion to an unprecedented new object, a land-mother. Mahendra’s aesthetic and sentimental perception initially objects to this unaccustomed connection—between the intense worshipping and protective love that a mother deserves from her child, and the uninteresting givenness of the land, which was always taken for granted, and unremarkable, but is now suddenly turned into a complex object of such reverential vision and sentimental devotion. It is not surprising that Mahendra is the great survivor in the final battles in the novel. Others make their impact and fade into the mistiness of time, but Mahendra, the ordinary good man, survives, although transformed. At the end of the novel, in one sense, nothing has changed in external historical reality; in another everything has changed inside the mind. Satyananda, the elusive guru appears at the end of the climactic battle, and advises reconciliation to the establishment of British power. Yet, the consciousness of people has changed, because they have learnt to see a new dream—navasvapnadarsana—which makes this acceptance historically impossible. The whole point of the novel, of its narrative jangle, of its cut and thrust, is the education of the common man in Mahendra; his political transformation by learning a new aesthetic of deshbhakti,¹⁵ a stark neologism that would quickly become a commonplace of nationalist discourse. He learns a new optics, a new vision of his land, and is given the gift of imagining it formed as a mother, and a language to worship her. The untraditional nature of this aesthetic is therefore marked in the novel itself; Bankim provides an internal interpretation to what he was doing narratively, inside the narrative: within the novel the relation between Bhavananda and Mahendra represents the relation between the writer and the reader.

What is left behind and what is aesthetically new can be found by comparing the aryastotra, the source, and Vande Mataram, the product. In my reading the Vande Mataram is the aryastotra transformed by the stress of living through the violent, desecrating chemistry of colonialism. The traditional song is to the Mother conceived as the mother, sustainer of the world. It is an imaginative and aesthetic conception of a premodern world which does not know of abstract space, a world populated by other peoples, alien and different. It is an invocation of a Mother to all that exists in this world, and a hymn to her glory. She is the Mother of a world that is close, near, homogeneous, close to hand, comfortable, full of familiar things and people. It is wrong to call this attitude a spirit of generosity. It simply does not have a conception of a world that is large enough, diverse enough, differentiated enough to hold other people and other gods, fundamentally, abstractly different from ‘ourselves’—the worshippers of this mother of familiar things. It is perhaps false to say that premodern people had no sense of a mapped world, but even if it was a form of mapping, that was done on very different principles. Those were not maps that showed the indubitable existence of Tahitians, without a person knowing empirically or immediately very much about them. The intense presence of the immediate world, with which persons can interact directly, occluded much of the abstract world beyond it. In modern mapping, the immediate world is only a small part of the abstract mapping of the earth., and can claim no geographic privilege

Vande Mataram is a hymn to a Mother who is created in the image of her worshippers, whose characteristics are all related to their collective self. She is emphatically a Durkheimian goddess, not different from the human beings she sustains and protects; she is simply a resplendent re-description of themselves. She is the glorious form of the nature they inhabit, of the people they are. It is a glorification that bends back towards the self, the ultimate object of this devotion. Implicitly, the ontology of the social world has become wholly different. The song sees the world as abstract space, all parts of which are not equally hallowed. It is a world of maps and peoples, of frontiers and divisions, of selves and others. It is animated by an emotion which presupposes the world created by modern geography and history books; in that conception India is not the world, but a part of the world, and presently an unjustly oppressed part. The emotion of devotion that this elicits is a fundamentally transformed emotion; from one of wonderment, satisfaction, supplication, and gratitude at being allowed residence in this wondrous scheme of things, it is now a tense emotion of grandeur, enthusiasm, and only barely concealed animosity. In the case of the first Mother there were no references to power because she symbolized all the powers of the world; in the case of the second Mother, unjustly diminished and insulted, there is a need to remind her children of the great, irresistible power that she can command:

All the characteristics of the Mother are combative; her stance has been changed from a universal and sustaining repose to an avenging energy evoking conflict and victory.

Clearly, what happens inside the song is similar to the sculpting of a figure using words as material. Linguistic newness is a strange thing: nothing that uses language for intelligibility can be, on the one hand, entirely new; on the other, although the intelligibility of the discrete linguistic elements is a condition of the possibility of new creations through language, by forcing words into carrying unaccustomed meanings authors are able to bring new linguistic possibilities into existence. The idea of sacredness is intelligible only through its separation and distinction from the profane. Yet nationalism manages to create a new language which performs the impossible; it habituates people in using a language of sacrality while referring to entirely profane objects.

Closely observed, the song has two parts, describing two separate types of imagery. Usually, in Hindu religious iconography, the deity is worshipped in a state of peaceful repose, even though he or she is often the invincible last resort of vulnerable and terrified human beings.¹⁷ The god Rama, for instance, despite his heroic exploits in the Ramayana, is always traditionally in a calm and reposeful state, devoid of exertion and anger. The underlying idea is that although evil might be temporarily, contingently powerful, in a cosmically well-ordered world the power of goodness incarnate in various godly forms deals with such challenges. To describe the almighty in a state of agitation would be a kind of sacrilege, a lack of confidence in his/ her invincibility. Only in some particular traditions, like the text Candi—much loved by Bengali devotees of the goddess Shakti—is the divine shown in an actively fighting state, her wrath depicted iconically in slaying figures of evil. Bankim’s song draws upon both these iconic systems equally. The first part of the song is placid, reposeful, continuing the usual conventions of depicting the calm, unagitated majesty of a deity, though her attributes are surprising: the waters, the fruits, the soft cool breezes, the abundant harvest. This too is an iconic invocation of power, but in a state of calm. In the second part, however, this power changes form into something that can be a force of a very different kind, a force fighting against oppression. This force is marked by the numbers of her willing soldiers, their raised weapons, the menacing roar of millions of voices raised in her defence. It is true that this awesome power is to be used only in their just defence against subjection and dishonour; but this is a startling and surprising transformation of one aspect of a deity. The goddess has undergone, in these few sentences, a fateful transformation: she is now literally made up of human beings, and the purpose of her incarnation is also an entirely mundane business—a fight against injustice. She is a new goddess of strife in a disenchanted, political world, participating awkwardly in fierce exchanges of mundane power in the modern world. She does not give sustenance and benefaction to all human beings; her divine invincibility is partial to her own people.

In Bengali religious thought there is a rich tradition of conceiving of the supreme being as a mother, a sustaining, protective, unconquerable force. But sustenance and protection are somewhat different ideas; or at least they give the same general idea somewhat different inflections. In the religious tradition of Shakti worship, there are two different iconic representations of these differently inflected ideals. In purely iconic terms, the Vaisnava tradition developed the image of the goddess Shri, who sustains the world, including her suppliant children, in an attitude of infinite affection: and her iconic representation describes her as karunagravanatamukhi, leaning forward a little in a gesture of pity very similar to the Christian images of Pieta. In the Shakta tradition of divine imagery, the emphasis is more on protection from evil, which takes the unconquerable feminine ideal into a more contestatory field of representation. Evil is given an embodied form; and the invincible mother takes on an appropriately warlike image as the triumphant Durga, who is depicted at the moment of her triumph against demonic images of evil, the Mahisasura. As is well known, she can also take a darker form, as Kali, who is violent, cognitively impenetrable, terrifying in her unpredictability, and pitiless like time (kala), which merges invincible power with the ability to deliver indiscriminate death and destruction.

Since it first appeared the Vande Mataram has never ceased to evoke controversy. Some literary and political critics point out, in their overall political reading of Bankim’s work, that there is a strong element of animosity towards Muslims in his thinking.¹⁸ I do not wish to contest this claim entirely, though I feel Bankim is aware of the problem and it occasionally troubles his otherwise liberal conscience.¹⁹ But a communal reading of this song faces several interpretative problems: it makes the meaning of the song rather confused. If the invocation of the goddess is entirely in order to free her world of Muslim misrule, it becomes an insoluble mystery how the song can be the pre-eminent anthem of anti-British nationalist sentiment. Did Bankim’s readers misjudge his authorial intention entirely, and turn a song meant as anti-Muslim tirade by a loyal British subject into an unintended anthem of opposition to British rule?

Even dedicated critics of Bankim, who regard him as the originator of Hindu communal discourse in modern India, would not commonly deny that the song had a triumphant career as an anti-British nationalist anthem. How was that possible? I wish to suggest it was made possible by a literary device—of playing with two temporalities of enunciation of the song. Diegetic time is often a complex form of dual temporality—of a time inside the narrative interacting through the story-telling device with the time outside the narrative, the always contemporary time in which the text is read.²⁰ Narrative temporality is often this double time—produced by the artistic device connecting character time with reader time. To yield to the narrative pretence, in this case, the song is being uttered/sung by a fictional character inside a fictional historical narrative placed in the eighteenth century, just before the secure establishment of British power. This is the time of the character. But the song is also being read in the time of the reader, in the late nineteenth century, in the privacy of the interiors of Bengali households. In this second time, the time of the reader, the oppressive regime is not Muslim but British, and the abstract, general question—‘why are you helpless in spite of such potential power?’—resonates in this context with a very different meaning. The historical novel in that sense is not historical at all; it is simply an elaborate pretence of writing about the present using a historic code. It is problematic to suggest that the whole of the novel is written in a consistent code of camouflage of intentions—that we can simply substitute the Muslim figures by British ones to complete our grasp of the sense of the novel. Literary critics also often point out the obvious difference between the utterance of characters and the utterance of the author. Anti-Semitic beliefs in characters are not necessarily the opinion of the author, so anti-Muslim sentiments of characters inside a novel are not necessarily those of Bankim. These arguments are technically justified, but besides them is a wealth of sayings by the author within his novels, and in his more unambiguously assertoric essays, which show he had absorbed a modernist-Orientalist understanding of the medieval period of Indian history. By this I mean that he saw political conflicts anachronistically, as hostilities between large collective actors—states or entire peoples who were subjugated or liberated. There is a sullen underlying hostility towards Muslim rule that is undeniable, though he has a sufficiently vivid realization of the demands of modern liberal universalism to feel troubled about it.²¹

Yet this element of hostility to Muslim rule makes the question of the historic ‘meaning’ of the novel more complex. The meaning of a literary text exists between its authorial intention and the intentionality of reading, and every individual reading is in a sense a contingent fusion of the authorial and readerly horizons. There is no doubt that, in the last novels, Bankim was preaching what his admiring contemporaries coyly called anusilantattva, the theory of defiant discipline, which consisted of two parts. On one side, there is in all these novels a repetitive creation of a theatre of action marked by injustice and the oppressive power of vidharmi rulers. Vidharmi signifies something more complex and more intense than ‘alien’ or merely descriptively foreign. It indicates something morally alien, a moral vision that subjugates, defiles, and destroys the settled moral habits of a people. Despite his liberal expressions of unease, Bankim’s novels are strewn with too many fictive scenes of Muslim oppression. The total effect of reading his novels is certainly an appreciation of Muslim rule as morally oppressive and repugnant; but there is also a subtle and not entirely surreptitious incitement to analogical reasoning which would regard British rule, on identical grounds, as both oppressive and repugnant. Bankim certainly had a change of mind about the cultural implications of British rule. His early works, while alive to the indignity of foreign rule, tend to regard the intellectual offerings of modern Western culture as positive. Towards the end of his life he comes to a much darker perception of cultural influences from the West, and seems to regard the emancipatory ideas themselves as causing a deeper and more troubling form of heteronomy. Precisely because of their universalist form, it was possible for natives to accept and own them, and offer rationalist, emancipatory grounds for their acceptance of these ideas. But that made it impossible to discern the essential difference between an unforced acceptance of rationalist ideals and a submissive, colonial adoption of the mores of foreign rulers. In humorous sketches like the Ingrajstotra, Bankim plays with this difficult theme that was central to controversies about religious conversion as well. Both in Christian theological discussion and Islamic doctrine, there is a persistent worry about the connection between power and morals within the conversion process. Real conversion from one religion to another, thinkers point out, must be an uncoerced choice, an adoption on purely moral grounds of a religious ethic seen by the converted as superior. Power within the equation contaminates this decision, with either fear or the expectation of mundane advancement which power can guarantee to the converted. Conversion affected by either fear of punishment or calculations of preference cannot be seen as real religious transformation.²² Despite its comic tone, Bankim’s Ingrajstotra raises an identical problem in a nonreligious, colonial context: how can one be sure that the acceptance of rationalist ideas is because of their purely rational powers of persuasion, and not a self-interested adoption of the intellectual fashions of colonial rulers? His intensifying suspicion of a secret heteronomy at the heart of emancipatory crusades of liberal rationalism inclines him increasingly towards a form of rationalized Hinduism, which stands at the heart of his new doctrine of patriotism. In the fictional world of the novels, this is converted into a logic of analogic thinking about historical situations: the dominance of the Islamic rulers is unjust and is opposed in the novels by characters displaying exemplary patriotism. In the world outside the novel, the world of its reading, not the internal world of its actions, it is easy to infer that there is a similar existence of dominant alien rulers; but now, in his later years, alien in this more complex and moral sense. The act of reading is therefore a double one, of two readings: a reading of the internal fictional fact, and an analogical, real fact of current subjection.

The reading thus has little trouble in analogically extending its meaning to the present. The song Vande Mataram operates on a similarly analogical register: the nation, an unspecified ‘we’, occupies the place of the oppressed in both equations; in the eighteenth century the place of the oppressor is occupied by the Muslim ruler, in the nineteenth by the British, and the song clearly points to the appropriateness of a similar sentiment against both types of subjection. But as the reading, and a virtual singing, occurs in the present, those words enunciate a patriotism directed at the present and real enemy. The beautifully crafted hatred of this song achieves a fascinating transposition, changing the image of the British from a race of political protectors, intellectual instructors, and cultural allies in rationalism to a race of political enemies. But the logic of analogical hatred is curious and complex; the transposition of hostility to the British does not erase its uses against Muslim rulers of the past. Thus, it is plausible to suggest that two acts of hatred happen in the singing of the song. Although it is increasingly turned into a song of nationalist defiance of British colonial rule and is the first literary creation to set this new dark emotion to music, there is an analogical reference to Islamic oppression in the very act of singing it. By making colonial oppression unforgettable, it also makes Muslim rule ineradicably alien.

Yet precisely because of its narrative context of hostility to Muslim rule, precisely because the authorial meaning is at least the first meaning of a text, Vande Mataram always attracts a different audience, a communal Hindu reception. This audience responds powerfully to the song precisely because of the duality of the adversaries within its abstract meaning, precisely because the image of the Mother who is ripudalavarini signifies a triumph over both the British and the Muslim. In a historical paradox, precisely because the purpose of fighting the British is now obsolete, its valence would retain, to this audience, primarily an anti-Muslim inflection.

They like the song because within this broader form of modern patriotism it always folds a longer and more insidious enmity, and because in this finely-crafted text hatred does not merely point to the British but also makes the other hatred unforgettable; and the reenactment of this, present, proximate contest always reminds people of, and connects to, the other conflict in Indian history. This is the second ‘structure’ of meaning of Vande Mataram; and the destiny of the song has been a conflict over these two powerful structures of interpretation. When Nehru decided to call this India’s national song rather than its anthem, he subscribed to the first structure; but the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) insistence that it be chanted in all Indian schools seeks to incline its meaning towards the second. Vande Mataram wanted to create a battlefield with foreign rulers at a time when such a battle could happen only in a political dream; but it inadvertently started a cultural battle over its own meaning which is far from settled.

There is another remarkable confirmation of the real complexity of meaning of this text. The authorial meaning evidently inheres in the complete text of the song, and the narrative frame which animates the words with their meaning. The first distanciation from this complete authorial intention occurs when the song is set free of its narrative architecture, and taken as a separate and independent composition by its admiring singers. But the interruption of authorial meaning does not stop there. As controversies start swirling around the full text of the song, various political groups suggest that only the first stanza of the song, which simply offers worship to the sustaining form of the motherland, should be sung as an anthem, not the offending second stanza. Again, this is a remarkable example of a group of receivers seeking to impose their meaning on the song irrespective of the authorial intent. Many poetic compositions which have come to acquire a political destiny have had such reception meanings imposed over the authorial meaning. Tagore’s composition, which was eventually adopted as the Indian national anthem—precisely because of the absence of such suggestions of offence—went through this tussle between the composition and reception meaning. The song as a whole was regarded as too long to be an anthem, and only the first stanza, which helpfully enumerated the major states of India’s federal constitution, was made the anthem. Still, what was poetically was not necessarily politically correct. Its mention of Sindhu—a reference to the region of Sindh—remained an inconvenient oddity: if it was a reference to a region, this might be read as an irredentist desire for the province of Sindh, lost at Partition to Pakistan; if it meant Sindhi-speaking people, they were certainly part of India’s immense melange of languages. Political interventions into the verbal body of the songs always demonstrated the play of two meanings—the authorial and the receptional. While the author’s meaning was foundational to the text, it was not, in case of these compositions which became political with time, its only or determinative meaning.

The new emotion is inextricably linked, in all nationalisms, to a theory of charged, significant, sacral residence. Space has to be given a new kind of sacredness. Traditional thinking in Hindu culture had a great richness of ideas about nature, or rather the nature of nature. Nature was thought of as prakrti, also the name of woman—agitated, generative, fecund, creative, restless, irrepressible. She is therefore the image of a primal, unconquerable force. But again this was an enveloping conception of nature seen as a precondition of human existence, and viewed as a source of general preservation and sustenance. It was not an image of a nature over which people could throw a possessive relation, a nature that was inextricably part of our self, or a selfness extended to nature and its neutrally existent features—such as rivers, mountains, paddy fields, and ponds. Undoubtedly, the romantic poetic and artistic imagination had something to do with this new intensified idea of domicile; our living inside this world making it special, just as living inside it made us sacred. Rain and sunshine, the cycle of seasons, the mundane business of sowing of seeds and harvesting grain, instead of being unsurprising, quotidian, grey processes, became aesthetic events. They became happenings, on the way to becoming sacred, their very occurrence a mark of peculiar speciality, precisely because these rains and sunshine, these hills and rivers, these grains and fields were those of the self. It is interesting to note how the new geography of abstract space—the space which is beyond the individual’s immediate apprehension, but which he knows exists—plays an important part in this transformation. It does not require much argument to show that things like rivers and mountains are not natural objects of love; and it requires a refiguring of the imagination to achieve affection for this intense and immediate nature, these inanimate objects. In earlier cultures, these may have been aesthetically admired, but not loved with such intensity. Poetry accomplishes the astonishing function of what can be called the selfing of nature. In this mapped and diversified world of neutral and natural space, one part with clear boundaries now becomes precious, sacred, emotive, and valuable: it becomes a moral home, the Motherland. Residence in the physical world is made sacred, and poetry becomes the privileged expression of this feeling.

After Bankim, the image of the Mother is invested with an immense fulness, and the figural form of the country as Mother, the image of the Mother-Land, so insecurely and polemically established in Bankim’s late fiction, once established, is never dislodged again. Constant addition to her descriptive richness slowly makes for a change, at least a potential change in the axis of this image. This will be evident if we compare the constituents of the images of the Motherland in Bankim and some others who followed him in the tradition of Bengali poetry. Even in the process of creation of value in nature, turning it into a home, the homeland, there are clearly discernible stages. While Bankim is still engaged in the basic process of iconic transfer, shifting the associations of the sacred image of the mother on to the unaccustomed features of the homeland, still trying to convince the puzzled audience of Mahendras, he is simply conferring characteristics of shubha (auspicious) or su (good) on apparently unexciting objects, convincing the Mahendras that this natural world, always present and available to us, is nevertheless something that deserves thanksgiving; and that it has to be regarded again through a complex aesthetic optics, taken partly from the sensuousness of classical Sanskrit poetry but transformed by lacing into it a new sense of the self’s residence.

Classical Sanskrit poetry saw nature only as a thing to savour, enjoy, take pleasure from—as something that enhanced the human idea of sensuousness, a nature that adorned and complemented women’s beauty. Using similar descriptive tropes, the new aesthetics converts nature into something valuable and anthropocentric in a new sense, connecting with a more urgent emotion of gratitude for its bounty, and invoking, at the edge of that palette of feelings, more darkly rudra emotions like resentment at her humiliation, the spirit of sacrifice, an avenging anger. Compared to the earlier aesthetic of nature, the new aesthetic is sadly limiting. It represents an appreciation of nature which is more intense but more parochial. Earlier, nature existed in two forms—a universal form in which it offered its beneficence to everyone, and a particular form when some of its features—like specific scenes—excited a very definable sense of pleasure. The new emotion that envelops nature is different from both these traditional perceptions. Formerly, the beauty of nature, its sustenance, its mysteries, were supposed to be universal. They beautified the lives of all human beings, or, in Kalidasa’s aesthetics, of those who had the sensitivity to appreciate the beauty it made so abundantly available. Now, nature’s beauty and bounty is felt more intensely, but not as a gift to all men; rather the special sacredness is of a special part, and to a special group of recipients. It is a mapped world, aesthetically and emotionally, intensely conscious of its boundaries, a world not joined by nature’s universality but broken by a humanly parochial sacredness. It is already disenchanted, to use Weber’s modernist phrase: from a world governed by God, it already appears like a world governed by the United Nations. This nature is also not particular in the sense in which romantic painting presented it—as a highly specific response of an artistic self to a particular landscape: a scene, a time of day, a strange play of light which was intense but individual. The new visual and iconic celebration of nature is collectivistic, its beauties are visible to its particularly favoured children.

I have argued elsewhere that this Mother is decisively created by the census, and commented on Bankim’s great and surprising artistry in putting statistics at the heart of a poem.²⁴ The Mother is not merely gifted with natural qualities, but also with the modern power of numbers: her children, who also make up her body, can roar with seven crore voices in her glory, just as much as they, somewhat unpractically, raise fourteen crores of hands bearing swords in her defence. The corporeal image of her in Bankim’s poem is very similar to the image of the Leviathan on the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, except that she was a woman, and there was a combination of the characteristics of the bountiful with the terrible. The carrying of two swords by each counted Bengali may be militarily inconvenient, but its point lies elsewhere, in the sense of invincibility and power that this counting produced. Bankim was wonderfully ingenious in turning the implement of colonial counting into a weapon of the nationalist imaginary.

But history is always an unreliable basis for glorification. In the case of more critical writers, the journey into history could also take a surprisingly self-critical form. Brahmo writers often undermined Hindu narratives of glory by counterpointing to them a narrative of indignity and injustices internal to Hindu society, and asserting that, more than British power, Indian society was fatally weakened by dishonor inflicted on its own people. In the generation after Tagore, two poets produced two extraordinary texts poised at different ends of the continuum of this increasingly contradictory poetic discourse on historical memory. Satyendranath Dutta, a young poet greatly loved for his rhythmic artistry, wrote a hymn to the land of Bengal with both strands of hyperbole, natural and historical, without a trace of any criticism. In one of Dutta’s patriotic poems a long line of Indian conquerors is indiscriminately enlisted, placing Asoka’s non-violent conversions beside military conquests of Sinhala and South East Asia.²⁵ At the other end there was an early and immature poem by Sukumar Ray (the incomparable writer of nonsense and children’s verse) with the misleadingly patriotic title Atiter Chhabi (images of the past). The title, in the long tradition of patriotic poems from Vande Mataram, invites an expectation of natural and historical glory; but it delivered a savage critique of the Hindu caste system and its diminishment of humanity by setting up an ever more intricate system of denials. On this view, British colonialism simply used the divisiveness of Indian society and punished it for its own sins.

Not surprisingly, the poetic discourse of Bengali nationalism slowly developed the language of excess common to nationalist literatures. Mother India is not merely glorious but globally incomparable. Nearly all poets and literary figures participate in this celebratory language of excess.²⁶ It should be remembered, however, that poetic propositions have a distinctive status in such language. Poetic language is often conventionalized; tropes of excess carry a conventionalized meaning rather than a meaning following its precise literal locution. Thus it is easy for even usually restrained thinkers to venture into the conventional language of excessive admiration when writing nationalist poetry. One of the best examples of such deeply felt and conventional admiration of the motherland in a language of excess is a composition by Dwijendralal Roy, a contemporary of Tagore’s. His is a particularly popular song of patriotism in which the lyricism of patriotic exaggeration, in a way, consummates a tendency of excess long implicit in poems of nationalist enthusiasm. Ray’s song goes into not unfamiliar raptures of exaggeration:

There is a land that is evidently the best among all countries in this bounteous world; it is made of dreams and bounded by memories. The song carries all the classic marks of nationalist imagination that modern theories emphasize: the connectedness of collective dreams of the future, and of common memories of the past. In the most unrestrained phases of its rapture, the song asks where else one can find such affection from brothers and mothers (bhayer mayer eta sneha kathay gele pabe keha), where else are lands with flowers so fragrant, where else is moonlight so cool. It is understandably unenthusiastic about a historical tour of the past, since the Brahmo attacks on that memory had proved so devastating, making it deeply inconvenient territory. Aggressive nationalist imagination therefore came back to an essentially unreasoned glorification of the self, which became mystical as it became excited and enthusiastic.

Interestingly, in the next phase of the complex history of Indian nationalism, two sceptical reactions emerged to this tendency towards intensifying cultural chauvinism. In the expanding nationalist literature, this iconic image of the motherland acquired both fulness and troubling features of internal complexity. First of all, in many cases of Bengali nation-worship,²⁷ there remained a complex, partly ambiguous relation between Bengal and India as two possible conceptions of this glorious place of residence, and the iconic image of the Motherland was ambiguously placed, not very inconveniently, between India and Bengal. Politically, this was enabling rather than inconvenient because it found, incongruously, a music expressing the complex stratified form of mature Indian nationalism which saw no incoherence in evincing patriotic emotion for both Bengal and India. Individuals could be proud of being both Bengalis and Indians, and the iconic images of the two figures were at times indiscernibly similar. But the growing image of Mother India had become bafflingly complex: it was an image that contained too many attributes, and eventually this turned from a single identifiable image into a repertoire out of which people could construct images of their Motherland after their peculiar ideological and iconic preference. To keep using the language of images and visions, the Mother that these songs and poems invoked and glorified, really differentiated into several images, invoking distinct predominant rasas, quite different constructive possibilities. Interestingly, these figures could also cancel out each other or quarrel among themselves, since the ideological visions of the Motherland that they expressed became different, often even contradictory.

At the height of successful political nationalism, from the 1920s, we can observe at least three forms of a feminine, iconic nation with somewhat different inflections in their symbolic imagery. The first is essentially the original figure of a human collective form given to nature—bounteous, sustaining, resplendent, but not aggressive; expressing a sentiment that simply wished to worship its own collective self through poetic self-glorification. The second was an iconic embodiment of intense, aggressive, exclusionary nationalism that stressed history more than nature.²⁸ It only recognized a Hindu self and a correspondingly Hindu past. More alarmingly for critical intellectuals like Tagore, it was incapable of criticizing anything in its own past, constantly urging a recovery of past glory that was already threatening to turn into the kind of political ugliness that Tagore had seen emerging in Europe. For some Indian intellectuals, this transformation of nationalism constituted a particularly heartbreaking betrayal. This showed that the ugly excesses nationalism in Europe—the imperial nations’ defence of the enslavement of others, and the Fascist states’ military aggressiveness—could find a parallel in colonial countries in the form of a divisive, exclusionary nationalism which regarded a part of the native society itself as its enemy. Tagore wrote in passionate condemnation of aggressive, parochial nationalism, and saw in this ‘a crisis of civilization’.²⁹ This second form of Indian nationalism did not show a way out of the crisis, either in the world or at home: that was merely India’s contribution to an incomprehensible epidemic of a degenerate form of belonging.

As an ugly form of nationalist enthusiasm became more apparent, Tagore experimented with an unprecedented interpretation of nationalism which turned from enthusiasm towards deeply felt self-critical guilt. Even in his poetry, with its predominant tone of reflexive self-absorption, Tagore had a capacity to blend in a profound sense of sadness over social issues. Untouchability and internal indignities troubled his spirit and were even expressed in rapt and entirely private relations with his God. He had a peculiar ability to subvert standard tales of heroic splendour by noting deep malaises in Indian society. His reinterpretation of the spirit of patriotism found a direction directly opposed to the standard enthusiasm for the past, and counteracted such exaltation by focusing on a collective feeling of guilt. A poignant presentation of such critical patriotism can be shown in his famous invocation of ‘his unfortunate land’, which did not deserve to be freed until she became equal to those whom she had treated with indignity. The ideas and ideals of this new form of self-critical nationalism have the directness and unattainable simplicity of his best poems, and can be rendered into unpretentious prose:

An equally eloquent articulation of this inclusive nationalism was in another poem evocatively titled Bharat-tirtha: India—the land of pilgrimage, which turns the image of pilgrimage into a metaphor for a cosmopolitan nationalism.³⁰ The earth of India is holy not because—as he himself had averred earlier—it gave to the world its great religions, but because it invited streams of humanity to mix and unite. This is in a sense, within its covering of poetic obscurity, an extraordinary inversion of what is of value in the nation—not its claim to purity, of its origins, of its uniquely valuable culture, but the opposite and more complex attraction of mixture and an ability not to be dogmatic. In the same poem he similarly switched and inverted the principles of ritual purity and touch, the twin principles of caste Hinduism, in an astonishing poetic move. The peculiar generosity of ‘Indianness’ invites the Aryan and non-Aryan, Hindus and Muslims, the Christians, and even, surprisingly, the English.³¹ Peculiarly for a patriotic poem, it repetitively and unremittingly connects the political and the social, the indignity of colonial slavery with the indignity of caste degradation, and asserts that a nation which treats its own people so appallingly has no moral right to political independence. In one of its most remarkable moves, the poem invites the Brahmin to hold the hands of all others—but after he has purified his heart (eso brahman shuchi kari man dharo hat sabakar).³² It calls the fallen (patita) and asks him, effectively, and remarkably, to forgive.³³ They must all hasten to a coronation of ‘the mother’, a ritual occasion conceived in the Hindu fashion as culminating in a final ablution, the pouring of holy water on the crowned head. In Tagore’s inversion, the water poured on the mother enthroned is to be rendered holy in a strange ritual. The water, which would purify the mother herself, waits; for it will not be wholly pure until it is hallowed by the purifying touch of all (sabar parase pavitra kara tirthallire).³⁴ This is the final ritual of inclusion and seeking forgiveness.

I hesitate to call this inverted Hinduism ‘liberal’. Despite the undeniable influence of a liberal moral imagination, it seeks a form of critical thinking that works on principles internal to the domain of Hindu thought. It forges its critical arguments not by drawing on Western liberal principles—with which its ideals largely coincide—but on deliberate inversions of traditional Hindu arguments. Instead of declaring that henceforth all lower caste people shall be treated as legal equals, it suggests using a language of asking for forgiveness from the untouchables for their historical repression. Like Rammohan Roy’s decision in the previous century to respond to Christian and rationalist criticism by rationalizing Hindu doctrine and staying within its imaginative world, this is a similar decision not to abandon religious discourse but to expand its horizons and to invert its hierarchies. Tagore may have argued that to abandon Hinduism and take one’s stand on the different fundamentals of liberalism was too easy: it would purify the deciding self without wading into the filth of social ills.³⁵ To become a liberal is to step aside and avoid this necessary internal struggle. This is a penance inextricably connected with Hinduism’s history. It could come only out of Hinduism’s struggle with its own history, not through imitation of some alien generosity. But one must recognize—despite our admiration for this icon of a Mother not sullied but instead purified by the touch of the lowest castes, and thus created by this moving gesture expiation of Hindu society’s historical guilt—that it is one figure among many.

Strictly speaking, the nationalism of any society is not a single coherent structure of ideas, but a repertoire; its emotion is not organized around a single image but an unstable array of possible images mined by different groups for their own peculiar iconic purposes. And the untidy memory that nationalism creates for its people through its successes, failures, compromises, and prevarications leaves its field of iconic representation always provisional and open towards new figurative possibilities. History and memory are deeply ambiguous fields, precisely because they are diverse and inexhaustible in their own ways. It is precisely the constant renewal of appeals to history which shows it is never final, never settled forever. Although this appears counterintuitive, the past as memory always remains unstable. In the case of Indian nationalism, the more history is used in this imagination the more it is fragmented and shown to be capable of alternative constructions.³⁶ Two lines of this past, two clashing types of memory—the glorious and the guilty—remain unreconciled to the end, bitterly contesting and cancelling each other in these poems and icons, which, as nationalism gains ground, come to acquire canonical status. One evokes the memory of a past about which Indians could be proud without any sense of guilt—remembrance of the Vedas, the classical literature, the empires, the power and the glory that was India. But there is another memory that follows this as its dark shadow, constantly reminding nationalists of the failures of this civilization—a past of untouchability, caste coercion, oppression of women, superstition, sati. This version of nationalism argued that it is impossible to be rationally proud of the necessarily mixed record of past times, but only of a reconstructed nation, without these deforming flaws, which can only appear in future. Patriotism thus remained a deeply ambiguous, if generally uplifting, sentiment, one strand drawing its poetry from the past, the other from an unrealized future.

At the time of Independence, Gandhi made the famously risky remark that his aim was ‘to wipe every tear from every eye’. In an analysis of Gandhi, Ashis Nandy shrewdly observes his use and exaltation of the ideals of femininity, his celebration, against the grain of a more masculine form of patriotism, of the woman-mother’s peculiar pity and caritas. Nothing reveals his feminine conception of emancipation more clearly than this phrase, a typical mother’s remark. The subject of this utterance could only be the Motherland created by a long process of iconic crystallization. But as Independence arrived and became soiled by its disappointments, as the tears remained unremoved, this image of a Motherland taking care of her children began to falter and attract travesty. The decline of this exaltation of sentiment began to show in two ways: in an increasing indifference towards such images and musical exhortation to collective sentiment. Independence Day celebrations at schools and town squares, which elicited a vivid and spontaneous emotion, in the early years began to look routine, tired, and deserted. In cinema halls, once, the national anthem at the end of a movie brought all viewers instantly to their feet; by the 1960s, people started shuffling out while the anthem played forlornly to emptying theatres. By making the iconic forms of nationalism ubiquitous, the state also made them banal.

But something more remarkable also began to happen. Bakhtin’s famous discussion of the laughter of the lower orders in the European renaissance showed how iconic representations that were slowly sculpted by the upper classes, and which represented the fundamental values of the society, were undermined by what he called the irreverent ‘popular laughter of a thousand years’. In India, the laughter of the lower orders began to puncture and undermine the solemn rituals of state nationalism. As the lower classes are less literate and lack control over the theatres of cultural production, this kind of sceptical unbelief could only express itself episodically, in surprising scenes of writing, in anonymous forms of production. I shall mention only one of them from my own experience. An extension of cosmopolitan nationalism occurred in the literary and cultural productions of the first two decades after Independence. Under the influence of Nehru’s recension of nationalist sentiments, Hindi films produced immensely popular songs which emphasized that strong nationalism was not necessarily opposed to internationalism. One of its most popular examples was a song sung by a character who claimed:

The song plays particularly on sentences taken from another celebrated patriotic poem by the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal, set to tune by the musician Ravi Shankar, which runs: sare jahan se accha hindustan hamara, hum bulbulen hain iske, yeh gulistan hamara (this India of ours is the best in the world; this is our garden of paradise, and we are its nightingales/singing birds). The song plays on, and against, this famous predecessor in several ways. Against its affiliation to India, the latter song emphasizes an ardent internationalism, though it does not forget to stress that its more universal sense of belonging (chino arab hamara) is not at the expense of a deeply felt Indianess (hindustan hamara). But it declares its affiliation to a radical universalism, against an elite nationalism, by claiming that though we have no place to stay the world as a whole belongs to us.

It was written by a subaltern poet, a bus painter with a tenuous command over Hindi spelling. But he showed the confidence of one who possessed a poetic truth, incorrectly spelt but politically poignant, trying to capture the life experience of a disinherited generation. It showed a miraculous mastery of allusions, its affect understood only if seen, like lines of graffiti, as a writing against previous writing, as lines written both in continuation and defiance of the entire previous tradition of nationalist sentiment, a piece of writing that stood both inside and outside the language of nationalism. Against the earlier, long, solemn, loving poetry that turned rain into beneficence, land into a home, this was a fatal exclamation of disenchantment. Precisely because of that great condensation of metaphors into the Motherland’s iconograph, this homelessness was transformed into a desolation much greater than not finding shelter in a large city. By turning the language of sare jahan se achha hindustan hamara against itself, it managed to express a much greater collective, historic, dispossession. Against the secure sentiment of nationalist glory that the educated classes take for granted and set to uplifting music, this expressed the bafflement of the poor asking what’s so great about belonging to a great nation.

¹ I am using the term ‘abstract’ in the sense in which Benedict Anderson uses the idea in his Imagined Communities (Anderson 1983). The people who constitute a nation must remain, for each individual nationalist, a group of abstract members whom he will never meet. Yet the emotion he cultivates for them is one that is similar to his feeling for individuals he meets and deals with face to face in his immediate life-world. It is this allegorical transposition of intimate emotions of affection, loyalty, and devotion which makes the feeling of nationalism so strange. But it is also one of the most remarkable features of our world that this strange and unnatural process has become the most unsurprising feature of modern history. The study of the symbols and language of nationalist discourse is an examination of the intellectual techniques by which this strange and unprecedented thing becomes possible.

⁴ As one of the first writers in modern Bengali, Bankim had to be a most self-aware user of language. His relation to modern Bengali is a paradoxically dual one: it is true that he writes in modern Bengali, but it is equally true that what we call modern Bengali is made to appear precisely through his writing. He does not have a pre-existing language called modern Bengali in which he writes his works. Rather, it is through his actual writing, he shows that something like this language is possible. He wrote an intriguing essay called ‘Bangala Bhasa’ (Bengali Language) which explores the various forms of Bengali idiom and techniques of their complex combined use in literary prose (Chattopadhyay 1964a).

¹⁹ See, for instance, the appendix to the revised version of Rajsinha, the last fictional work of his life Bankim Rachanabali, Volume II, 555–662. This passage is significant, in my view, because it uses a device that is also at work in the enunciation of Vande Mataram. The novel’s last edition ends by saying: ‘let no reader think that the purpose of this work is to make a distinction between Hindus and Muslims. Hinduas are not always good and Muslims bad, or Muslims good and Hindus bad. Good and bad elements exist in equal measure among both groups. Rather one has to admit when the Muslims were rulers of India for somany centuries, Muslim rulers are superior to their Hindu contemporaries.’ (Chattopadhyay 1984: vol. II, 661.

²⁶ Even Tagore, who would subsequently turn deeply critical of modern European nationalism for its militarist enthusiasm, and begin to suspect more excessive forms of Indian nationalism as well, was not immune from this conventional use of the trope of incomparability. One of his poems on Bengal, Sarthaka janam amar janmechi ei dese, goes on to say: kon desete janine phul gandhe eman kare akul, kon gagane othe re cand eman hasi hese (in which other land do fragrant flowers fill the heart with such longing, or the moon rise in the sky with such a smile). Tagore 1970: 24, 257. Atulprasad Sen writes of India as adijagatajanapujya (the original object of worship of the whole world—song 72) and, in another favourite of the patriotic canon, bharat abar jagatsabhay srestha asana labe (when India will again take the place of the finest in the assembly of the world—song 73). Sen 1996: 89, 91.

²⁷ This refers to patriotic compositions—poems or songs—written in Bengali, but in the worship of Mother India (Bharatmata). There was a parallel strand of similar emotive writing about Mother Bengal: as in the song by Rajanikanta Sen, another prolific and talented composer of the time: ‘Banga amar, janani amar, dhatri amar, amar des/kena go ma tor chinna vasan, kena go ma tor malin ves.’ Tagore also composed poems in praise specifically of Bengal, one of which, Amar sonar Bangla, ami tomay bhalobasi, became the national anthem of Bangladesh.

²⁸ In the 1860s some perceptive thinkers had expressed alarm at the emergence of this trend. The conservative Hindu thinker Bhudev Mukhopadhay stressed in his reflections on collective selfhood that emphasis on nature and material culture went towards a perception of commonness between peoples of all religion, because, despite doctrinal differences, they resided in the same nature and developed the same material ways of dealing with its conditions. English education, he observed, influenced some new intellectuals to develop a divisive perception of the historical past and regard Muslims as their historical enemies. Bhudev’s reflections demonstrate that all Hindu thinkers were not necessarily hostile to Muslims. See Mukhopadhyay 1981.

³¹ For a discussion of the question ‘who is an Indian?’ see the sensitive exposition of this point of view in Khilnani 1997, and the defence of this kind of complex perception of identity in Sen 2005. A collection of Tagore’s songs in excellent translation, which stresses the nationalist cycle of songs, Svades, is Bardhan 2008. Though it is a trifle odd to extend this kind of generosity of feeling towards the British at the height of the nationalist conflict with colonial power, this is not uncharacteristic in Tagore’s intellectual evolution. Much of his prose writing had been concerned with the question of how best to be an Indian, and his famous novel Gora is entirely concerned with this conundrum of identity. Gora, the protagonist, who initially believes he is the purest breed of Brahmin, is eventually revealed to be the son of an Irish couple. His insistence on being an Indian eventually leaves only such a wide, cosmopolitan definition as the possible way.