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Indian Express
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
The myths and utopias of two nationalisms
I have been following the fascinating conversation of ideas between Yogendra Yadav ('The nationalism we forgot', IE, May 27 and 'The rediscovery of nationalism', IE, June 5), Suhas Palshikar ('Who stole my nationalism?', IE, May 31) and Akeel Bilgrami ('An alternative nationalism', IE, June 16). I add here my thoughts as a back-bencher. 'Nation', in its earliest Latin sense, meant 'people', referring to their birth, origin, breed, race, or tribe — somewhat like the Indian kula, gotra and vansha. Its earliest meaning in English was 'a people or an ethnic community with a shared language'. After the emergence of John Locke's political theory, the connotation changed to 'a political society — subjects or citizens — inhabiting a defined territory within which its sovereignty is exercised'. That foregrounded the people's identity as citizens and the sovereignty of the political order they adopt, a fundamental shift from the term's original meaning, bringing it quite close to the Indian term rashtra. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) prioritised sovereignty in the arena of international relations. Yet the evolution of the term 'nationalism', based on the root 'nation', had a long wait in store. The League of Nations was established in 1920 and, as a result, the term 'nation' assumed a somewhat defined and universal meaning. 'Nationalism', which until then was confined mostly to Western Europe's politics and history, acquired global currency as a dominant political philosophy during the 1920s. In the India of the 1920s, the Indian term rashtra and the European 'nation' jointly formed the semantic ground for India's nationalism. What had until then been the 'freedom struggle' became India's national freedom movement. It was around the same time that Essentials of Hindutva (1923) by V D Savarkar was published, defining the Hindutva brand of nationalism. It brought together the concepts of pitrubhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (sacred geography). Hindutva nationalism primarily drew upon 19th-century European developments that had led to the unification of Italy and the formation of a German-speaking nation. The term pitrubhumi, for instance, shows the deep imprint of the European unification movements on Hindutva nationalism. The national independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and others had a different orientation. It equated nationalism with freedom. It, too, was inspired by various movements outside India such as the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Irish struggle for independence and even the Russian Revolution, but its understanding of how India as a 'nation' was to be constituted differed radically from the Hindutva idea of the nation. In the 1920s, Congress established Prantik Samitis, region-specific committees, and articulated the idea of India as a federation of people speaking many different languages. During the years of World War II, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi alerted the world to the dangers of self-engrossed nationalism. The Constitution of India was shaped in light of that vision of India. It described India, that is Bharat, as a 'union of states'. All through the 1950s and 1960s, Indian territories were reorganised as linguistic states, collectively forming the Indian federation. The nationalism inscribed in the Constitution and Hindutva nationalism have remained at variance from their very inception. The main points of difference between the two were neither patriotism nor sovereignty. It has been the affiliation of citizens to the nation on an equal footing. The ideology of Hindutva nationalism is deeply suspicious of the patriotic loyalties of citizens whose punyabhumi is not geographically part of India. The constitutional notion of nationalism accepts all those who live in India as entirely legitimate and equal citizens. Owing to its peculiar reconstruction of history, Hindutva nationalism puts forward a narrative of Indian society in terms of the 'original' and the 'subsequent' citizens. In that view of history, Sanskrit is depicted as the 'mother' of Indian civilisation and its genealogy is stretched to the pre-Indus Valley civilisation. Many professional historians do not accept the Hindutva historiography as the overwhelming bulk of available archaeological, genetic, linguistic and historical evidence points to its deeply tendentious nature. Hindutva nationalism has, therefore, depended more on propaganda and conversion of the gullible to its vision of history. It has attempted to claim all that was in ancient, proto-historic and prehistoric times as a single and continuous efflorescence of 'Hindu' theology and philosophy, flattening all ancient debates and disagreements and all social tensions in India's past. Similarly, in order to push the thesis about the 'suspected loyalty' of those whose cultural geography does not overlap with India's physical geography, Hindutva nationalism depicts the entire post-Sanskrit mediaeval period as an era of darkness. History shows that both these claims are factually untenable. Archaeology and linguistics tell us that some of the earliest parts of the Vedas were composed in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Similarly, medieval India produced a powerful Bhakti Movement that challenged the varna system and social inequality. In fact, the cultural residues of the Bhakti Movement, which had spread in mediaeval centuries across most languages of India, inspired many leaders of the freedom struggle, such as Tagore and Gandhi. Any mention of that historical fact infuriates proponents of Hindutva nationalism. The nation, not as a people but in its subsequent ideological forms, gradually came to include the past of a people as well as their future. The past, when imagined as being spread over a very long span of time, becomes a challenge to memory and begins acquiring the form of myth, really an irrationally compressed and transformed version of the past. The future, spread over an endless time, becomes a challenge to the imagination and acquires the form of fantasy or utopia. Every brand of nationalism in every part of the world has attempted to generate its myths and its utopias. In India, both versions of nationalism have shaped their own myths and utopias. Constitutional nationalism is based on the idea of a past that was culturally and philosophically diverse, while also being wounded by caste and gender discrimination. The Hindutva version is that of a once-upon-a-time vishwaguru, deeply hurt and humiliated by outsiders who came here. Constitutional nationalism aims at correction; Hindutva nationalism seeks revenge and retribution. Can one of the two be obliterated forever? Can the two versions ever meet? Perhaps India will have a secure future when the nation — the people — manages to go beyond nationalism. Devy is the author of India: A Linguistic Civilization (2024)
Indian Express
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Yogendra Yadav writes: When a nation's idea of itself is stolen, what follows must be more than recovery
How should you react when something you value is stolen? Once you overcome the initial bewilderment (Where is it?), curiosity (Who stole it? How?) and guilt (Was I careless?), you arrive at the all-important question: How do I reclaim it so as to not lose it again? That is the question I would like to take away from the thoughtful response ('Who stole my nationalism?', IE, May 31) to my article ('The nationalism we forgot', IE, May 27) by Suhas Palshikar — my colleague, co-author and friend for three decades. His disagreements are constructive, as our starting point is the same. Suhas bhai puts it better than I did: It's not just the backsliding of Indian nationalism, but the delegitimisation and resolute replacement by a phoney version based on the 'narrow, vicious, macho and exclusionary European duplication of nationalism'. Therefore, reclaiming Indian nationalism is arguably the most critical priority for political action today. Let me begin by accepting all the corrections that Suhas bhai suggests to my initial outline. Indeed, Indian nationalism was an audacious project, difficult to realise and even more difficult to sustain. Yes, the uniquely Indian version of 'belonging without othering' always had its communal rivals in the Hindu and Muslim versions that copied the European models of national belonging via the 'othering' of religious communities. Of course, we have not just forgotten our nationalism; it has been stolen by the RSS version of pseudo-nationalism. That leaves only one serious disagreement. Suhas bhai thinks that I exaggerate the role of the tiny English speaking and deracinated elite in squandering the rich legacy of Indian nationalism. I still believe that the ruling class is always tiny, yet its ideas become the ruling ideas with lasting consequences. But this is a dispute the two of us can continue over a cup of tea (with bakarwadi from Chitale Bandhu) in Pune. Let me focus on the more pressing question of the here and now: What is to be done? How do we regain Indian nationalism in a way that we do not lose it again? This is not a simple political question of how to take on the BJP. This is also not a simple ideological question of how to combat the RSS's Hindutva with our received liberal progressive ideology. This is a serious intellectual and cultural question. I suspect that critics of today's phoney nationalism underestimate how serious this intellectual challenge is. Let me list three uncomfortable questions that we need to address head-on before we begin the project of the recovery of Indian nationalism. First of all, what is India? Is this a cultural-civilisational entity or just a political unit with boundaries defined by accidents of history? The pseudo-nationalist version offers a narrow yet thick notion of Indianness, of Bharatvarsha, a Sanatan and Akhand Bharat, that may be rescued from 1,000 years of Muslim and British colonial history. The response of the progressive critics is to fall back upon a liberal yet thin version of Indianness, which views India only in modern, political and constitutional terms, as a political community of people brought together by accidents of history. The uncomfortable question that we need to ask is this: Is the modern Indian state a successor to the civilisation called India? If so, what are its defining cultural features? Answering this question, without falling into dominant majoritarian myths, was never easy. In a sense, Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India was an attempt to do exactly that. The task has got more difficult today after Partition and with deeper awareness of the multiple histories and geographies that the Indian state is heir to. Yet, this is a question we cannot evade any more. We need a thick yet liberal notion of Indianness, a notion that has cultural resonance with the people of India. Second, should we be proud of being Indian? Here again we confront two bad answers. The dominant answer is jingoistic, the political equivalent of football club loyalty. Every Indian must, at all times, be proud of everything Indian as it is our 'motherland'. This powerful sentiment then drums up all kinds of reasons for this pride: India as the vishwaguru, India as the mother of democracies, India as the fountain of ancient wisdom, and so on. The critics of this narrative of national pride demand good reasons for such an assertion. Accident of birth is no proof of excellence; if anything, this conflict of interest calls for extra care in judging our own country. They find it difficult to take pride in a country full of class inequality, caste oppression, gender injustice and what not. They respond with guilt, if not shame, about being an Indian. So, the difficult question is: Can we address the deep sense of cultural inferiority that Indians have inherited from their colonial past? Can we do so without inventing ridiculous lies about plastic surgery in ancient India? Can we do so without brushing under the carpet the ugly truths about our country, our society, our civilisation? Can we come up with ways of self-affirmation that inculcate pride without asserting superiority over others? Finally, what do we owe this entity called India? Here again, the dominant answer is simple and powerful, if totalitarian. In this version of nation-comes-first, we owe everything, unlimited and unquestioning loyalty, even our lives, to our country. This requires suppressing any competing demand from a lower or higher unit: From attachment to any region, religion or language or from considerations of internationalism etc. The critics of jingoistic nationalism are more circumspect about what and how much they owe to one of the many entities that demand our affection. They want a space to assert other identities, from regional to global. Faced with aggressive nationalism, their loyalty appears shallow. They look non-aligned and can be dubbed anti-national. So the challenge is: How do we define deep loyalty to the nation in a way that does not preclude other equally legitimate commitments? I suspect that the progressive and liberal critics of the RSS-BJP do not have good answers to this or the other two questions. In sum: Our challenge is to reimagine a deep and non-jingoistic nationalism, at once culturally rooted in the plural heritage of our civilisation and open to claiming the heritage of humankind. That is what the nationalism of our freedom struggle was. Yet we cannot simply go back to that nationalism now. As Suhas bhai reminds us, it was a rather precarious achievement in its own times. Besides, a lot of water and blood has flowed in the Ganga since then. So we have no option but to recreate, rearticulate and then regain the nationalism that we lost. Suhas bhai is right: Creating a deep sense of 'belonging without othering' was and remains an 'audacious project' always exposed to external challenges and internal hiccups. This is infinitely more difficult than the jingoistic political project of finding external and internal enemies to forge a unity based on hatred. But I am sure he does not believe that in this audacity lies its impossibility, that this is a good reason to give up on this project. The project of reclaiming Indian nationalism is not an optional project for some Indians of a particular ideological orientation. The success of this project is the precondition for the very survival of India. The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal
