Chapter - 2

Discourses of
Nation / Nationalism

Subaltern Studies as a critical form of history writing problematized the discourses of

nation and nationalism. From the inception, subaltern scholars and historians re-
imagined and re-theorized the concept of Indian nation. As David Ludden has pointed
out, Subaltern Studies represented a new kind of people’s history that was free of
national control.1 The history of Indian nationalism  notes Partha Chatterjee, founding
member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective  that had been written since the
nineteenth century, spawned such ideas, views and narratives as could be marked as
communal and fundamentalist in nature. So, over the years, ‘secular’ historiography
faced a crisis in that it had to make a balance between the policy of the post-1947 Indian
state and the history of Indian nationalism.2 The subalterns not only exposed the
‘bourgeois’ nature of Indian nationalism, but at the same time, they pointed out that
peasant and tribal movements from below in colonial India had been appropriated by
elite nationalism and subordinated to the nationalist project. As Gyan Pandey has shown
in a study of peasant revolt in Awadh in 1919-1922, the Congress party actually
attempted to undermine the Awadh movement because of its anti-landlord character.3

In its early years, the basic argument of the Subaltern Studies project was that the
'nationalist leadership' had attempted to use ‘highly controlled’ struggles of the Indian
masses in order to confront and then replace the colonial masters. But the collective's
project had an even more ambitious aim: they wished to reconstruct peasant
consciousness itself, and to demonstrate its autonomy from elite nationalist thought. In
order to do so, they sought out both new sources and attempted to reread the traditional
archives 'against the grain', all with the aim of recreating the mental world of the peasant
insurgent. Over time, however, the subalternists began to shift their position. The
influence of post-modernism and post-colonial studies began to make itself felt. Now the
central theme of the project became not the capture of popular resistance for the interests
of an ambitious Indian bourgeoisie, nor the restoration of subaltern consciousness, but
the argument that the 'nationalist' venture was essentially faulty. In the name of 'progress'
and 'modernity', the nationalists, after 1947, had enforced a repressive centralising state
on the 'fragments' that comprised Indian society. Partha Chatterjee argues in The Nation

57
and its Fragments (1993) that secularism and enlightenment rationalism are useful
weapons in the armoury of the post-colonial Indian state. Similarly Dipesh Chakrabarty
insists that the very notion of a good society or of universal progress are 'monomanias'
that need to be refused in the name of the 'episodic' and the 'fragment'.4

The originality of Subaltern Studies, writes Ludden, came to be its attempt to rework the
nation beyond the state-centred nationalist discourse that reproduced the binary of
colonial power / knowledge in a world of globalisation. This new national history is
made up of discrete moments and fragments, which subaltern scholars try to find in the
‘ethnographic’ present of colonialism.5 The present chapter is an attempt at locating the
polemics of the Subaltern Studies project regarding Indian nationalism and the nature of
the Indian state after 1947.

Ranajit Guha on Cambridge Explanation of Indian History

We like to begin with Ranajit Guha, the high priest of the Subaltern Studies collective.
Guha was not ready to approve of the dominant modes of historical discourse. That is, he
was equally unsparing of the colonialist / neo-colonialist and nationalist historiography
of the politics of Indian nationalism. In chapter 1, we have referred to the view of Indian
history as propounded by the so-called Cambridge School. For our convenience, only a
few things can be illustrated here. Major exponents of Cambridge School such as John
(Jack) Gallagher, Anil Seal and others maintained that Indian nationalists were driven
only by self-interest. They persistently carried out rationally designed policies and their
devout statements must not obscure the nature of Indian nationalism as ‘animal politics’.6
Indians were described as a highly impulsive people who opted for rebellion only when
they failed to become clerks. Thus, militancy in the Krishna-Godavri deltas during the
Civil Disobedience movement of 1930-32 was attributed to the inability of some people
to ‘find a satisfactory niche in local government’. Indians were to be pushed towards
nationalism because they could not think beyond their village or town, nor was their gaze
set on anything nobler than local grievances and petty gains.7 Gordon Johnson pointed
out that Indian politicians were primarily concerned with local politics and they took
interest in national politics only when they were motivated by the government to do so.
“Nationalist activity”, writes Johnson, “boons and slumps in phase with the national
activity of the government.”8

58
The general orientation of nationalist historiography, on the other hand, ‘is to represent
Indian nationalism as primarily an idealist venture in which the indigenous elite led the
people from subjugation to freedom’. Nationalist historiography was said to have
followed the ‘mass’ enunciation of nationalism mainly ‘negatively’, that is, as a problem
of ‘law and order’, and positively, if at all, ‘as a response to the charisma of certain elite
leaders or in the currently more fashionable terms of vertical mobilization by the
manipulation of factions’.9 If Cambridge scholars inaccurately claimed that Britain’s rule
in South Asia was rooted in the collaboration of its subjects, and that the Raj was a “rule
of law”, then there was also a nationalist version of that bogus claim to hegemony, as
well. According to it, people’s consent to the rule of “their own” bourgeoisie was taken
for granted in the anticolonial campaigns started by the leading party of the elite – the
Indian National Congress – and consequently since 1947, in its long term of
governmental power.10

Reacting to both liberal-imperialist and nationalist histories, Guha announced in the first
volume of Subaltern Studies (1982) that the elitism that had for a long time governed the
historiography of Indian nationalism was both ‘colonialist’ and ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ in
essence. Elsewhere, in a later work, he argued that both colonialist and nationalist
regimes represented a quintessence of what he considered a ‘dominance without
hegemony’. Guha defined hegemony as “a condition of dominance” where “persuasion
outweighs coercion”. In his view, the dominating expression of colonialism could be
seen as the nationalist’s choice for the indigenous notion of danda, which literally means
stick.11 In either case, Guha argued, elitist historiography failed either to recognize or to
understand the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of
the elite to the making and development of the nation. Subaltern scholarship set out to
locate and listen to the nonelite voices of history  voices that countered hegemonies of
the colonial and indigenous elites.12

Guha observed that the writings of the historians belonging to the Cambridge School
contained a template, which, in his words, pointed to the ‘bad faith of historiography’.
As Anil Seal saw it, Indians were simply reactive. Hence, agency never belonged with
them. The political history of nationalism was a history of native ‘collaboration’, shorn
of ‘resistance’. Indians were used to looking to the ‘state’ as the principal locus of
political agency.13 Responding to this, Guha argued that the attempt in colonialist

59
writings to make British rule in India appear as a rule based on the consent of the Indian
population – that is, as hegemonic – was nothing but an illusion. The inconsistencies and
contradictions that gave colonialism its specific character in India were not central,
according to Guha, to either Cambridge or nationalist discourse about colonial rule. For
to erect a problematic founded on the acknowledgment of such contradictions would be
to dispute the liberal paradigm itself. In Guha’s view, it is this decisive failure, which
was largely responsible for a grave distortion of the power relations of colonialism in
historical discourse.14

The essential point about that distortion, writes Guha, is that dominance under colonial
circumstances has quite inaccurately been gifted with hegemony. In other words,
resistance to colonial rule in India has been forced to break up ideally into a hegemonic
dominance. This enabled the bourgeoisie, according to the elite historiography, to stand
for the whole society and make its hegemony thereby as it had done on its historic
achievements in England in 1648 and France in 1789. For Guha, however, the reality is
very different. The institution of British paramountcy in South Asia had failed to triumph
over the resistance of its indigenous culture to the extent of being forced into a
symbiosis. The significant question that Guha asks for an answer is: ‘Why did the
universalist drive of the world’s most advanced capitalist culture … fail, in the Indian
instance’ to assimilate, even abolish, ‘the precapitalist culture of the subject people?’
After all, as Karl Marx argued in The German Ideology, this drive enabled the ‘ruling
ideas’ ‘to invest the bourgeoisie with the historic responsibility to “represent” the rest of
society, to speak for the nation, and build its hegemony thereby’.15

The bourgeoisie alone had the advantage of being urged to work in this role as a class.
Hence, subjugators, kings, and magnates had hitherto been happy to rule over subjugated
populations without even trying to incorporate them into a hegemonic ruling tradition.
Autocratic rule was thus the opposite of the bourgeois state. Absolutism did not
necessitate any exchange at the level of culture. All that it involved was complete
subordination. It did not have a ruling culture, although there was a ‘ruler’s culture’
working alongside that of the ruled in a state of reciprocal unconcern. No wonder,
therefore, that the colonial masters in the age of first colonization during late eighteenth
century had a good measure of forbearance, even some sort of appreciation, for Indian
culture. In Guha’s view, what is amazing, however, is that even after British capital,

60
strengthened by industrial expansion, had come of age and surmounted the opposition of
all the insular forces of metropolitan politics, the Universalist tendency of British
capitalism had to deal with the ‘heterogeneity and particularity’ of Indian political
culture. In a word, bourgeois Universalism fell short of producing a hegemonic ruling
culture like what it had done at home.16

Guha has given the answer in his own way. As he explains, the nature of the state that
colonialism had constructed in India by military power required the colonizing
bourgeoisie to compromise with its own Universalist project. The colonial state in India
was not born out of the doings of Indian society itself. It was estranged from the political
culture of the colonized, with no space of arbitration or transactions between the will of
the rulers and that of the ruled. Hence, the exercise of authority in dominions far from
metropolitan Europe came to count on fear rather than consent. This finds expression
through the violent, militarist, and despotic nature of colonial rule in India until nearly
the end of the nineteenth century, when militarism ended but the character of the raj as
an autocracy remained unchanged. Even Dodwell, an unashamed defender of the empire
and a “guru” of colonialist historiography, who believed that the English government had
succeeded in establishing “the rule of law” in India, took notice of “the despotic form of
government maintained by the English in India” and spoke of his compatriots in the
subcontinent as “English despots”.17

In colonial India, the making of the law had no connection with the will of the people.
Indians did not enjoy the right to vote for most of the length of British rule. A very
limited voting right was granted during its last thirty years. The Act of 1919 allowed
franchise only to three percent of the adult population. It rose to a still meager fourteen
percent nearly three decades later during the Act of 1935. It may also be noted here that
the ‘law’, during the first hundred years of the raj was merely a body of executive orders,
decrees, and regulations. And, most significantly, the implementation of the laws was
time and again distinguished by double standards. First, until the end of the nineteenth
century, one law was for the whites and the other for the natives. Secondly, during the
rest of colonial rule, one law applied to the administrative elite, British and Indian, and
the other to the rest of the population. Referring to all such issues, Guha has questioned
the very concept of the rule of law in colonial India. As he asks, how could the

61
knowledgeable British intellectuals including Henry Dodwell, bureaucrats, and
politicians go on talking about a rule of law in colonial India?

Guha thinks that the answer lies in the all-encompassing power of the principles of law
in English political thought. The common sense of politics hailed that ideology as ‘Rule
of Law’. As a blend of the ‘institutional and conceptual’ aspects of that system, it
gradually gained the status of a code and acted as a go-between for all perceptions of
civil conflict. Accordingly, this code came to signify the entire configuration of power.
Guha remarks that the hallucinatory effects of ideology were responsible for hailing the
national experience of Britain as an ‘achievement of universal significance’. This was
done not only by the English liberals and colonialists like Dodwell but also by English
radicals like E. P. Thompson. 18 Thus, bourgeois culture strikes an overwhelming limit in
colonialism. None of its noble achievements like Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty, Rule
of Law, and so on can survive the relentless demand of capital to develop and replicate
itself through the ‘politics of extra-territorial, colonial dominance’. As Guha puts it,
colonialism thus stands not only for the historical offspring of industrial and finance
capital, but also for its ‘historic Other’.19

Guha refers to such Indian liberals as Rabindranath Tagore and M. K. Gandhi, who had
started with a good deal of confidence in British rule, but did not accept Dodwell’s ‘rule
of law’ as ‘a cultural achievement of universal significance’.20 As Guha shows,
Rabindranath perceived as early as in 1893 the difference between the liberal as the
colonizer and the liberal as the colonized. The dominant’s angle of vision, he bitterly felt
as a representative of the colonized, radically differed from that of the dominated in any
observation of dominance. That is why whatever they learnt of the English doctrine of
law as an ideal, did not work in colonialist practice. There was gross distortion of the
ideology of a rule of law in the governance of the raj in India. Rabindranath dwelt on this
theme in different essays written between 1893 and 1903.21 It became clear to him that
there was profound racist arrogance on the part of the Whites in their social transactions
with the natives as well as in the judicial and other areas of public administration. He
cited many such instances in his essay Prasanga-katha.22 Rabindranath referred to
Kipling’s imagery of India as a zoo where the natives had to be kept under control by the
whip combined with “a promise of bones for food and even a little affection that was

62
owing to pets.” Thus in Tagore’s eyes, colonial rule was based on the principles of
ruthlessness and coercion. 23

Gandhi, according to Guha, was rather “slow to shed his illusions” about British
liberalism and democracy. For Gandhi, the British system was “intrinsically and mainly
good.” But the system finally lost its standing with him after the Punjab Wrong of 1919.
Pointing to the vanity and sham of the colonialists and their native collaborators he
wrote: “The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the
administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime [of using
the law for the purposes of colonial exploitation] I have attempted to describe. I am
satisfied that many English and Indian officials honestly believe that they are
administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making
steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of
terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all
powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people and
induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and
24
the self-deception of the administration.” Thus, Ranajit Guha concludes that in the
estimation of even the most “reasonable” Indians, colonialism came to be “a dominance
without hegemony.”

Under conditions of dominance without hegemony, the life of civil society can never be
fully absorbed into the activity of the state. Hence, the bourgeoisie, while attempting to
establish supremacy in Western Europe, would make a ‘virtue’ of accommodating its
rivals by ideological manoeuvers. Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology how
in the nineteenth century, a rising but still immature bourgeoisie failed to achieve
paramountcy and sought to make this failure look like a constitutional principle valid for
all time.25 As Guha maintains, this bourgeoisie realized that its rule over its Asian
subjects must count more on force than on consent. In elitist historiography, this
bourgeois ‘achievement’, known as colonialism, was characterized as hegemonic. As
Hegel wrote in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, it was the state “which not
only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it.” Real history, in
Hegel’s view, presupposed the existence of the state. No state, no history.26 This
observation of Hegel found expression in the complicity of a colonial state in India and
the production of colonialist histories of the raj. This colonialist historiography got a new

63
orientation in the writings of the Scottish utilitarian philosopher James Mill whom his
biographer -- Scottish philosopher and educationist -- Alexander Bain described as the
“first historian of India”.27

As Mill saw it, India and Britain were two divergent entities having difference in every
detail of life – religion, manners, civilization, and language. Still he held that history of
British India “forms an entire, and highly interesting, portion of the British History”.28
How could that be possible? In Mill’s analysis, it was so because as a product of the
metropolitan state of Britain, it was a vehicle of its will. Thus, the colonial state of India
represented the life of the colonized as no more than a moment in the career of the
metropolitan state.29 Consent, asserted Mill, not force, would be the guiding principle for
this state. That is, liberal culture and liberal government were supposed to rule Indian
society. However, as far as the Indian empire was concerned, ‘Anglo-Indian’
performance fell short of Utilitarian principle making the ideal of liberalism a lip service
only. While Mill and others were pretending to write the history of India, they were
actually writing the history of Britain in its South Asian career.30

Imperialist historians such as Mill and Dodwell connected politics with education in
colonial India. Dodwell believed that Indian nationalism “was born and nurtured under
the stimulus of Western education.”31 Many years later, this colonialist voice found
expression in Cambridge historiography when Anil Seal pointed out that education was
one of the chief determinants of modern politics in India and its emergence was clearly
linked with those Indians who had been schooled by Western methods.32 Thus, Mill’s
plan of reducing Indian history – writes Guha – to a portion of the British history, was
implemented in the ridiculous diminution of Indian politics to Western-style education.
However, a few years later Seal and some others put forward a slightly different version
in which the ‘genesis’ of modern politics in India was sought not in Western education
but in the structure of imperial government, that is, the band called colonial
administration.33 Two other Cambridge scholars David Washbrook and Christopher
Baker attempted “to outline the principal administrative institutions of southern India and
to show how they influenced the development of political organisations.”34 Cambridge
historiography actually revived the old colonialist position by a new formula of power.
Like the previous imperialist historians, Seal and Gallagher also believed that politics
was a matter of imperialist stimulus and native response. This response, as Seal,

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Gallagher, and Johnson clarify their previous position in 1973, does not come in the form
of culture or education, but of government.

Guha has rejected this neo-colonialist historiography as a symptom of unashamed bad

faith. As he points out, it is not what it pretends to be. It is not concerned with the history
of India at all. Its aim is to write up Indian history, after Mill, as a “portion of the British
History.” Cambridge scholars characterize colonialism as a hegemonic dominance. In
their project, the colonized have no will of their own. They are mere “collaborators” of
the raj and their response to imperial initiative appears to be entirely imitative. In India,
collaboration brought about by competition and representation, effectively triumphed
over resistance. Thus, colonialism implies ‘British rule through Indian collaboration’. To
quote Anil Seal, “The British built the framework; the Indians fitted into it;” and again,
“Imperialism built a system which interlocked its rule in locality, province and nation;
35
nationalism emerged as a matching structure of politics.” Corroborating this view
Gallagher writes, “Government impulse had linked much more closely the local and the
provincial arenas of politics; and the general trend among Indian politicians … was to
react to this initiative by copying it.”36 The implication is clear: Indian nationalism was
nothing but a progeny of imperialism. In Gallagher’s words, “Imperialism devours its
own children. Nationalism destroys its own parents.” 37

The relation between the rulers and the ruled is characterized in this thesis as a patron-
client relationship. This relationship makes for the dynamics of politics, or to be more
precise, “transactional politics”. ‘Contractors’ and ‘subcontractors’ mediated the
transactions. Indians competed and bargained freely and openly for ‘opportunity’ and
‘resources’ made available by the Raj through the institutions of government. No doubt,
colonialism generated a movement in Indian politics. However, the question is: who
benefited from this movement? Who actually could appropriate most of the land,
education, and coveted jobs? The answer is simple: the elite, that is, a very small
minority of the population. Therefore, this Cambridge description of politics that
borrows freely from the vocabulary of political economy is far from the reality. The
situation was related less to the bargaining in an open market than to feudal mockery.
The theory of a broad-based Indian collaboration is unfounded. Representation also
never succeeded in mobilizing Indian cooperation and consent on any considerable scale.
The representative bodies under the Raj were restricted in such a manner as to enable the

65
government to set Indian assistants “work particularly at the points of execution rather
than of command”. In all senses, representation in colonial India was a restricted affair.38

The Cambridge approach, described by Seal as an alternative approach to give a ‘general

explanation’ of Indian history, has put popular resistance firmly outside politics. Thus,
Seal dismissed the Indigo Rebellion and the Deccan Riots as “peasant risings of the
traditional type, the reaching for sticks and stones as the only way of protesting against
distress.” For him such movements were old-fashioned which had no political content.39
In a word, the Cambridge historians simply write off the phenomenon of resistance in
their general explanation of Indian history. They picture the Raj as a regime of
hegemonic and unifying dominance based on a nonantagonistic relation with its subjects.
That is how they set out to explain all of colonial politics for us.

Subaltern Studies historians have contested the political philosophy of improvement put
forward by the Cambridge School. They point out that it is too much to describe colonial
rule as a civilizing force. Nor is it fair to think that the Raj did successfully improve the
quality of indigenous culture by introducing liberal Western values. If anything,
colonialism was never so hegemonic as to overcome the resistance of entrenched feudal
customs and belief systems. What is more, the British government in India failed to
address the radical urge for reform in that large area of Indian society where the so-called
Western values could not penetrate. No wonder, Cambridge historiography, to cover up
this failure of colonialism, ignored the force of numerous autonomous movements of the
subaltern. As mentioned earlier, Guha has described this Cambridge paradigm as the
“bad faith of historiography.” 40

Indians resisted foreign rule throughout the colonial period in every region of the
subcontinent in many different ways. These ranged from the most peaceful to the most
violent and involved participation of people that occasionally amounted to tens of
thousands at a time. There was a “specific political content” too in these recurrent
instances of resistance. As Guha asks: without giving any space to such incidents in the
history of colonial India, what kind of “general explanation” of that history can the
Cambridge school offer? In his view, it is not that easy to erase resistance from history.41

Seal put it that there was no horizontal solidarity in Indian society. The Raj simply
recruited collaborators from the Indian elites who then engaged in a rat race for

66
“influence, status and resources” offered to them by the government as the prize for
collaboration. Secondly, ideology had nothing to do with the response of the Indians to
foreign rule. In Seal’s analysis, whatever “public ideology” existed in colonial India was
related to culture, not to politics. As David Washbrook remarks, “It is important to
remember that religious, caste and linguistic groupings are not political groupings unless
they can be shown to behave as such. They are categories of cultural but not necessarily
political activity.” Thus, Cambridge historiography has deliberately denied the existence
of horizontal mobility and popular ideology in indigenous politics to assert that there was
never any trace of resistance against colonial rule. There was nothing to politics other
than collaboration of subordinate with superordinate at every level.42

For Guha, such an explanation of politics is both monistic and reductionist. It is monistic
because it situates politics within a single elitist domain. It is reductionist because it is
designed to impoverish nationalist politics by reducing it to an interaction between the
colonizers and a very small minority of the Indian population made up of the elite. Seal
was definite that local struggles in India seldom indicated any sign of mobility between
fellows. There was seldom an “alliance of landlord with landlord, peasant with peasant,
educated with educated, Muslim with Muslim and Brahmin with Brahmin.” 43

Seal’s argument does not stand a closer scrutiny of Indian history. One can remember the
incidents such as the Pabna disturbances of 1873, the Swadeshi Movement of 1905-11,
the Munda uprising of late nineteenth century, the industrial strike of 1929, the
Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918, or the Tebhaga campaigns of the 1940s. They
adequately point to the relevance of such things as class struggle, caste conflict,
communal strife and adivasi assertions in colonial India. We know that in Pabna,
landlords stood united against tenants and the Swadeshi Movement witnessed how the
Namasudras of Barisal as a caste took part in an anti-bhadralok campaign. Birsa
Munda’s uprising was an evidence of tribal solidarity. The jute-mill workers’ strike in
1929 and the mill-owners’ alliance against the workers in Ahmedabad in 1918 betrayed
their class antagonism. The sharecroppers’ struggle for two-thirds share of crop in
Bengal in the 1940s can also be explained in terms of class solidarity. Again, communal
identity played havoc in the partition riots of 1947 on both sides. Above all, there was
outburst of nationalism in the great Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit-
India Movements. As Guha sarcastically comments, if we take these as instances of

67
political mobilization, Cambridge historians would dismiss them as vertical. On the
contrary, if we accept these as instances of horizontal mobilization, they would be
defined as pre-political.44

Guha on the Contradictions of the Nationalist Campaigns

At the same time, Guha has focused on a sharp contradiction between the elite and the
subaltern domains of politics in the nationalist campaigns. In his view, the elite
leadership was anxious to resolve this contradiction in terms of its own interest, which
was idealized as the interest of the nation. Hence, leaders like Gandhi had to devise
modes of control for exercising power over the subalterns. Thus, to quote Guha, “The
alien moment of colonialist dominance was matched … by an indigenous moment within
the general configuration of power.” 45 The Indian bourgeoisie under colonial rule had no
actual power or authority so far. In their striving for hegemony, they simply looked
forward to power. As Guha explains with reference to Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie
was supposed to express its hegemonic aspiration in terms of universality.46 However, in
the Indian colonial context, the push for universality of the indigenous bourgeoisie took
the form of nationalism. This was inevitable, writes Guha, because the dominated always
copy the language of power used by the dominant. Thus, the Indian elite could compete
for hegemony in two ways. First, by organizing Indian society into a nation; and
secondly, by claiming to represent the whole of India under the rubric of nationalism. In
other words, the indigenous bourgeoisie had to mobilize the people under its leadership
with a view to setting out its historic project of a South Asian nation-state. Here
mobilization implied that the masses would necessarily consent to transfer their loyalty
from the Raj to the nationalist leadership and its party – the Indian national Congress.47

Nationalist discourse highlights this element of mobilization with much enthusiasm. In

all histories written from a nationalist point of view, there are graphic descriptions of
how all sorts of people took part in their hundreds of thousands in the freedom struggle;
how they came forward to listen to their leaders and sacrifice everything for the cause of
liberation. Thus, mobilization could successfully transcend the barriers of caste, class,
gender, and regional interests forging a grand unity of the nation. It was thought to be the
handiwork of nationalist leaders, which worked as a superior will over an inert mass.
This is how the nationalist discourse has effectively countered and neutralized the neo-
colonialist theory of attachment on the part of Indians to their rulers. In Guha’s view, this
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is an elitist approach because it simply dismisses any overt popular initiative. It is
abstract as well because of its denial of that very real tension between force and consent,
which, according to Guha, gave Indian nationalism its form and substance.48

Nationalist mobilization thus signified a struggle for hegemony. There are evidences that
indicate that in its contest for the latter, the elite leadership did face the resistance of a
political culture in which force had been privileged over consent by virtue of an age-old
tradition. Guha has given examples from the episodes of the Swadeshi Movement of
1903-1908 and the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920-1922. Both these movements
witnessed how the nationalist leadership came forward to speak for the people by
mobilizing them in opposition to the government.49

Guha thinks that the question of hegemony flashed as an issue of central importance in
the politics of Swadeshi and Non-cooperation. As far as the Swadeshi Movement is
concerned, the nationalist leadership tried to characterize the colonial state as a
dominance that had failed to gain hegemony. Hence, nationalists in general agreed on the
need to withdraw cooperation from the Raj in order to demonstrate that it did not rule by
consent. Tilak said, “The whole Government is carried on with our assistance and then
[the rulers] try to keep us in ignorance of our power of co-operation … We shall not give
them assistance to collect revenue and keep peace. We shall not assist them in fighting
beyond the frontiers or outside India with Indian blood and money. We shall not assist
them in carrying on the administration of justice. We shall have our own courts, and
when the time comes, we shall not pay taxes. Can you do that by your united efforts? If
50
you can, you are free from tomorrow.” At the same time, the leaders were keen to
express their hegemonic ambitions through the mobilization of the masses. Coercion had
been a means of mobilization. A great measure of violence was used for destroying
imported goods and those who patronized such imports or cooperated with the
administration were faced with harsh intimidation. That way mobilization was shorn of
popular consent. Social coercion taking the form of caste sanctions was no less potent a
weapon. Rabindranath did not approve such crime organized by the disciplinary and
divisive forces of social conservatism. In an article named ‘Sadupay’, he wrote:

Vmaedr duàBagY† …†, Vmra ÷aDInta ca†, ikǼ

÷aDIntaek Vmra AÇ»err siHt ibSÿas kir na| manuexr
buiÁbâi¹r pãit SãÁa raiKbar meta oDàZ Vmaedr na†,

69
 Vmra By ŸdKa†ya taHar buiÁek Å›tebeg pdant kirbar jnY
Ÿcöa kir | buiÁr w VcreNr ÷aDInta ŸZ manuexr peQ kI
AmulY Dn taHa Vmra jainna| Vmra men kir, Vmar met
sklek calaena† skelr peQ crm ŸSãy| At…b skel Zid stYek
buiJya Ÿs peT cel teb Baela†, Zid na cel teb Bul
buJa†yaw cala†et H†eb Î ATba calnar skelr Ÿcey sHj ˆpay
VeC jbrdió»| … bykeFr Ÿjed piRya Vmra …† skl s„iQÐ
ˆpay AblÜn kirya iHtbuiÁr mUel VGat kiryaiC taHaet
51
seÆdH na†|

(Our misfortune is, we cherish freedom but we have no faith in it from our heart. We
have no patience to show respect to the faculty of human mind and intellect; [rather] we
try to subdue it by intimidation. We fail to perceive that freedom of mind and behaviour
is priceless. [Hence], we like to impose our views on others. If all abide by this principle
taken as truth, it is all well, if not, they need to be directed by unjust reason. Or else, the
best way of mobilization is coercion. … There is no denying the fact that in our
obstinacy for boycott, we have taken to these short cuts and struck at the roots of good
sense).

Rabindranath felt that the purpose of Swadeshi was to unite all with a view to liberating
society from obscurantist institutions, values, and customs. He wanted people to be free
from “spiritual servitude”. Hence, the individual must have the freedom to choose his
own way of serving the cause of social and political emancipation. Patriotism must not
be allowed to base itself on fear and coercion. No wonder, Rabindranath invited much
52
unpopularity for this disagreement. Guha has particularly cited example from the
tradition of Hindu caste sanction Rabindranath so vigorously denounced. Caste sanction
that postulated purity against pollution was fundamental to Hindu orthodoxy. Swadeshi
leaders relied on social boycott in the name of discipline for mobilizing the Swadeshi
Movement. On several occasions, social pressure was imposed on the so-called offenders
who bought Manchester cloth. The incidence of social sanction, which took such forms
as withdrawal of ritual services, refusal of inter-dining, boycott of wedding receptions
and funeral ceremonies, was documented in the reports of the police and the
contemporary press.53 This explains the contradictory character of Indian nationalism. It

70
is clear that under the rubric of nationalism there were paradoxes between emancipatory
and disciplinary, unifying and divisive forces of Indian society. Guha writes that judging
by the predominance of social sanctions in the eastern districts of Bengal such as Dacca
and Pabna – the districts that were politically very active – a close connection between
nationalism and casteism can be located.54

The inherent contradiction at once becomes clear. The ideology of caste being essentially
ancient and conservative in nature appeared to be embedded on nationalism that was a
modern and progressive concept. Rabindranath had serious doubt if the Swadeshi
Movement were at all based on popular consent. The poet was shocked to see the affront
on manushyatva (humanity) and dharma (morality) caused by Swadeshi mobilization.
He was deeply concerned about the way the movement tried to legitimize itself by the
argument of popular consent and he raised the issue in his writings.55 He bitterly
observed that national unification could not be achieved by forcefully stopping all traces
of public disagreement. Here is a quote from his article “Sadupay” written in 1908:

…† ˆpleQ Vmra ŸdeSr inmÈeSãNIr pãjageNr †¬Ca w suibDaek dln

kirbar Veyajn kiryaiClam, Ÿs kTa ÷Ikar kiret Vmaedr Baela laeg na, ikǼ
kTaFaek imTYa bilet pairna| taHar Pl …† H†yaeC, basnar AtuYgãta Ãara
Vmra inejr Ÿcñaet† ŸdeSr …k dlŸk Vmaedr ibr›eÁ daƒR kra†yaiC|
taHaidgek Vmaedr menr meta kapR pra†et ktdUr pairlam taHa jain na,
ikǼ taHaedr mn ŸKaya†lam|

Vmra muslman w inmÈeSãNIr iHÆduedr ... inejr met cala†bar …b„ kaej
laga†bar Ÿcña kiryaiC, ikǼ †Haidgek kaeC Fain na†| stY kTaFa …†
ŸZ, †„erejr ˆper rag kirya† Vmra ŸdeSr Ÿlaekr kaeC CuiFyaiClam, ŸdeSr
Ÿlaekr pãit Baelabasa -bSt† ŸZ igyaiClam taHa neH| …mn Abóùay "Ba†"
S×Fa Vmaedr keË ifk ibìÁ Ÿkamlsuer baej na Î ŸZ kiRsurFa Vr-smó»
56
÷rgãam Capa†ya kaen Visya baej ŸsFa AenYr pãit ibeÃx|

(We do not feel well to admit that we strove to intimidate the aspirations and benefits of
the lower class subjects of our country. But we cannot say it is a lie. As a corollary, we
have forced a group of people stand against others by our over-determination to satisfy

71
our ambitions. How far we have succeeded in furnishing these people with our desired
clothes is beyond our knowledge. But surely, we have lost their confidence.
We have attempted to lead and use the Muslims and lower class Hindus according to our
views and intentions, but we have never lovingly drawn them close to us. The truth is
that we rushed to the people not because we love them but because we are annoyed with
the English. In this situation, the word “brother” does not sound well in our mouth. The
tune that at once jingles alarmingly is the tune of contempt for others).

Clearly, Rabindranath was convinced that the Swadeshi activists had failed to influence
people to rally to their cause. He was not at one with the Superintendent of the Calcutta
Police who ignored the incidence of coercion. The Police Chief wrote on 21 September
1905, “These lads or boys have been furnished with small printed or manuscript slips and
these they tendered to the purchaser or would-be purchaser. The slips set forth, that any
person buying imported goods will drink the blood of his father or mother and would
57
practically kill a lac of Brahmins (sic).” In fact, in a letter dated 8 October 1905,
lieutenant-governor Andrew Fraser noted that there had been little violence and the
agitators remained within the limits of law.58 For Rabindranath, however, the notion of
violence included the use of force in any form whatsoever. Hence, physical threats and
caste sanction meant no difference. From the poet’s point of view, branding a purchaser
of foreign goods as guilty of mahapataka was nothing short of the most inhuman use of
force.

Social boycott continued as a potent weapon because nationalism itself was the product
of a culture that dictated such sanctions. Gandhi himself writes in 1920 that “the
possibility of non-violent social ostracism” under the then “extreme conditions” certainly
remained despite his disapproval of “the threat of ostracism against those who do not
adopt the remedy of non-cooperation.”59 To find a solution to this problem he insisted on
a distinction between ‘social boycott’ and ‘political boycott’. In Young India, Gandhi
explained the difference between the two. He wrote, “Boycott is of two kinds, civil and
uncivil. The former has its roots in love, the latter in hatred. In fact, hatred is another
name for uncivil boycott … The underlying idea in civil boycott is that of refraining
from accepting any services from or having any social associations with the person
concerned. The idea behind the other form is to inflict punishment and pain … We do
not want to punish [the person concerned]; we want, rather, to express our own grief by

72
 60
refusing to associate with him.” In Gandhi’s view, social boycott meant denial of
social service, which was morally not acceptable. Political boycott, which revealed
Gandhi’s ideal of spiritualized politics, implied denial of “social amenities and
privileges.” According to Gandhian doctrine, the boycotted person was not entitled to
host social functions such as marriage feasts, or entertain guests on occasions that
involved commensality. That is, the persons whom he had invited to his feast should
boycott him, or, as a donor, Brahmans should turn down his ceremonial gift.61

But as Gandhi himself admitted, “There was social persecution, there was coercion, I
must confess that I did not always condemn it as strongly as I might have … I thought it
62
would die a natural death. I saw in Bombay that it had not.” David Hardiman has
discussed the use of social boycott in the Kheda district of Gujarat in his outstanding
63
work Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat. To establish hegemony in India, colonial rule
counted on the structures of collaboration of the Indians. Guha sees Non-cooperation as a
strategy of the nationalist elite to counter that hegemony. Non-cooperation’s aim was to
mobilize the masses in order to destroy the structures of collaboration in India. In Guha’s
view, mass mobilization was intended to be founded on persuasion because only that
could give the nationalist elite a right to speak for the nation. Indian National Congress
worked as an instrument of the national bourgeoisie in their effort, to put it in Gramscian
terms, to exercise “leadership before winning governmental power.” 64

Hence, the congress had an all-embracing character. It was considered “the only truly
national political organization in the country.”65 It was a representative of the nation,
which subsumed all other organizations, parties and interest groups in the country. “The
Congress”, wrote Nehru, “ claims to speak for India as a whole … That is to say what it
demands is not for any particular group or community but for the nation as a whole.”66 In
other words, the primacy of the congress was affirmed. All other organizations were
inferior to it. As Nehru put it, the congress was by far the biggest, the most powerful and
the most widespread mass organization in the country – one that appealed to the nation.
Nehru even went to the extent of projecting the predominance of congress on a global
scale. Thus, he declared, “There is hardly any national body in the world to match the
Congress.”67 Guha observes that herein lies the crude outline of a hegemonic project.
While claiming dominance for the congress, the elite leaders actually claimed for power
on behalf of the indigenous bourgeoisie.68
73
A worried Gandhi observed that there should be no such competition between the
Congress and the other organizations. If anything, members of the other organizations
should feel proud of belonging to the only national organization of India, that is, the
Congress. For a ‘consummation’ of the union of the Congress and all the other political
bodies, felt Gandhi, Congressmen should show broadest toleration towards those holding
opposite views, so long as they do not come in conflict with the avowed object of the
national organization.69

But that ‘consummation’ never materialized. Even a decade later, the Indian National
Congress fell short of being acknowledged as the sole representative of the nation.
Rather, communal violence and class considerations contested its hegemonic claims on a
larger scale. Hindu-Muslim conflict reached monstrous proportions in the last two
decades of colonial rule. “It is an irony of Indian history”, writes Guha, “that the political
mobilization which signaled the end of the raj – that is, the partition riots of 1946-47 –
turned out to be the most decisive test of Congress’s claim to undivided popular
allegiance and a test the Congress failed to pass.” The Muslim League under Jinnah
challenged the unitary notion of nationalism that the Congress party upheld so
vigorously. Eventually, it had to compromise with Jinnah’s two-nation theory.70

Class interests also confronted the party’s claim to hegemony. True, the two most
important sections of the subaltern population – the peasants and the workers -- rallied
around the Congress in large numbers. Yet, leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were not
quite happy with the quality of popular response induced by the Congress campaigns.
The two subaltern groups were mobilized to join the nationalist movement in the early
1920s. By that time, they had developed their own class aims, which could not be
integrated into the nationalist programme chalked out by the bourgeoisie. The relation of
the bourgeoisie to the peasantry and the working class was an impediment in the way of
full-fledged involvement of these two classes in the nationalist movement under the
aegis of the Congress. On the one hand, the Congress could not brave to shake off its ties
with landlordism or different forms of feudal oppression. On the other hand, the interwar
period witnessed a great wave of trade unionism and socialism. Under the impact of war
economy and the Bolshevik Revolution, a sizeable section of the workers became more
and more militant and hostile to the Indian industrialists. The nationalist elite faced
74
unsolvable problems as the organized sections of workers came to play an important role
in the anti-imperialist struggle. 71

As Guha sums it up, a major determinant of Indian politics of this period was the failure
of nationalism to incorporate the class interests of peasants and workers successfully into
a bourgeois hegemony. The situation was different in the West. As Marx and Engels had
noted, the interest of the bourgeoisie in Europe was primarily associated with the
common interest of all other non-ruling classes. Because of the existing circumstances,
the bourgeoisie were still unable to build up its own interest as the interest of a particular
class. Hence, the bourgeoisie came forward not as a class but as the representative of the
whole society.72 By contrast, the Indian bourgeoisie, functioning under an oppressive
colonial rule, was caught in a position where it distinguished itself sharply by its
animosity with its Other – the working class. The Indian bourgeoisie failed to represent
the nation because there was always a subaltern voice that spoke for a large part of
society. This subaltern voice, observes Guha, rang out of the depths of a parallel and
autonomous domain.73

Partha Chatterjee’s Intervention

We can now turn our attention to the writings of Partha Chatterjee, the political theorist
of the Subaltern Studies group and a master of nationalist discourse. One of his major
arguments is that the essential character of the post-colonial Indian state was
authoritarian. The techniques of rule in the national state in India after 1947 did not
fundamentally change from those of the colonial masters. British ideologies and
practices were kept almost unbroken. This became possible due to the character of Indian
nationalism. This nationalism liberated the country from colonialism. But it failed to set
up new forms of rule, as it had to work within a structure of knowledge that was so close
to the configuration of power it wanted to repudiate.74 Indian nationalist thought
borrowed direct from modern, western political ideas and social theory. As Chatterjee
puts it in an interview, in most cases the nationalist movement essentially sought to
create a European style or Western style modern state which was to count upon Western
constitutional principles and technologies of administration. Certainly, there were leaders
who wished to replace Western forms of rule with the indigenous ones. Gandhi was one
such leader who refused to welcome what he called English rule without the
Englishman.75 His forms of popular mobilization were very different from those of the
75
West. However, the result had been frustrating. Indian nationalism could never give rise
to ‘a different modernity’.76

Thus, in explaining the nationalist thought of the colonial elites, Partha Chatterjee’s
primary assertion was that nationalism in India was a ‘derivative discourse’ from the
West. At the same time, it was ‘different’ also. It was derivative because it criticized
colonial rule under the influence of modern, western political thought and social science.
It was different for, there was a room for thinking about a modern state differently.
Gandhian intervention signified an opening up of new and alternative ways of thinking.77

In this context, it would be convenient to give a quick look into the extremely powerful
theoretical ideas presented by Benedict Anderson on the nation. Anderson theorized the
nation as ‘imagined community’. He held that sociological conditions such as language,
race or religion had little role in the making of nations. Rather everywhere, nations were
imagined into existence. Here is a quote from Anderson:

Nationality, or… nation-ness, as well as nationalism are cultural artefacts of a particular

kind … the nation … is an imagined political community – and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign. … It is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. … The nation is
imagined as limited because even the largest of them … has finite, if elastic boundaries,
beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. … It
is imagined as sovereign because … nations dream of being free … The gage and emblem
of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because,
regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is
always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that
makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much
to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. 78

Anderson also argued that Asia and Africa actually followed the models of Western
Europe, the Americas and Russia in building up their respective nationalisms. In other
words, nationalisms in Asia and Africa chose their imagined communities from certain
‘modular’ forms, which were offered to them by Europe and the Americas. As Anderson

76
puts it quite curtly, the ‘last wave’ of nationalisms, mostly in the colonial territories of
Asia and Africa, was originally a reaction to the new-style global imperialism made
possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. The educational and administrative
systems, introduced in the Asian and African colonies by their masters, provided the
territorial base for new imagined communities in which the ‘natives’ could come to see
themselves as ‘national’. The native intelligentsias, speaking their vernacular as well as
the language of the colonizers, had entrance into forms of nation, nation-ness, and
nationalism sanitized from the chaotic experiences of American and European history.
These models, in turn, helped to give shape to a thousand inchoate dreams.79

Chatterjee, who has sympathy for Anderson’s position, makes a central objection to his
argument. In Anderson’s project, Europe and the Americas are destined to be the only
true subjects of history. Asia and Africa are posited at the receiving end. Their task is to
choose their imagined community from the modular forms provided by Europe and the
Americas. In that case, their nationalisms have nothing left to imagine. As if, history has
given the verdict that the postcolonial world would only be permanent users of
modernity! Only the West has the right to decide on the characters of our anticolonial
struggle! Even our imaginations are perpetually colonized. This West-centric view
diminishes the experience of our anticolonial nationalism to a caricature of itself. As
Chatterjee concludes, evidences show that the most prevailing and the most inventive
consequences of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an
identity but rather on a ‘difference’ with the modular forms of the national society that
are proliferated by the modern West.80 Chatterjee in fact criticizes the theories of Elie
Kedourie, John Plamenatz and Ernest Gellner along with Anderson from a postcolonial
standpoint. As he asks, “What … are the substantive differences between Anderson and
Gellner on 20th century nationalism? None. Both point out a fundamental change in
ways of perceiving the social world which occurs before nationalism can emerge… Both
describe the characteristics of the new cultural homogeneity which is sought to be
imposed on the emerging nation… In the end, both see in third-world nationalisms a
profoundly ‘modular’ character. They are invariably shaped according to contours
outlined by given historical models.” 81

It is very significant that Gyan Prakash, an active member of the Editorial Collective of
Subaltern Studies, makes a critique of some arguments of Chatterjee here. As Prakash
77
points out, while Chatterjee is right in his observation that the nation had to be imagined
differently in India, he fails to notice that this imperative also applied to the nation-state.
The nation-state, Prakash argues, was not a “surrender to old forms of the modern state”.
The politics of the state did not simply outwit the logic of community. We shall come to
this point in some detail after analyzing Chatterjee’s position about Gandhi in contrast to
Nehru.82

As Chatterjee points out in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the
nationalist discourse in India developed through three distinct stages. First, the ‘moment
of departure’. Second, the ‘moment of manoeuvre’. Finally, the ‘moment of arrival’. At
the initial stage, nationalist consciousness was constructed through the structure of
knowledge that was a product of post-Enlightenment rationalist thought. He calls this
stage the moment of departure. The moment of manoeuvre is when the masses were
mobilized in support of nationalist consciousness. And, the moment of arrival is when
nationalism became a ‘discourse of order’ and ‘rational organization of power’.83

To clarify his position Partha Chatterjee has dwelt on the thoughts of Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay (1838-1894), a noted Bengali intellectual, mentor of Rabindranath, and
one of India’s first nationalist thinkers.84 Chatterjee particularly looks at the ways in
which Bankimchandra’s thought relates culture to power in the context of a colonial
country. A staunch believer in the philosophy of spirit, Bankimchandra sought to reunite
it with a doctrine of power. Here power does not mean physical strength. It rather
involves an attitude. Bankimchandra was of opinion that foreign powers had subjugated
[Hindu] India for a very long time mainly due to one crucial cultural attribute of the
Hindus: their attitude towards power. Bankimchandra made a sharp critique of vairagya
– the central postulate of Sankhya Philosophy -- that influenced most of the religious
beliefs in India, including Buddhism. Sankhyadarshan or Sankhya philosophy taught
Indians too much of other-worldliness and fatalism. That is why Indians despite their
immense physical power suffered so many set backs against the Muslims as well as the
British. Under the influence of Sankhya, all social progress completely stopped over
time. Here is a quote from Bankimchandra’s original Bengali writing:

paëcatY sBYtar mUl kTa, ¯aen† Si¹¡, iHÆdusBYtar mUl kTa, ¯aen†
mui¹¡| du† jait du†iF pâTk ˆeÀSYanusÉaen …k peT† Zaºa kireln|

78
 paëcaetYra Si¹¡ pa†yaeCn Î Vmra ik mui¹¡ pa†yaiC ? bó¼tW …k Zaºar
ŸZ pâTk Pl H†yaeC, taHaet seÆdH na†| †ˆerapIeyra Si¹¡-AnusarI, †Ha†
tƒaHaidegr ˆÊitr mUl| Vmra Si¹¡r pãit ZtþHIn, †Ha† Vmaidegr Abnitr mUl|
†ˆerapIyidegr ˆeÀSY ŠiHk ; taƒHara †Hkael jyI| Vmaidegr ˆeÀSY pariºk Î
85
ta† †Hkael Vmra jyI H†lam na| prkael H†b ikna, tiÃxey mteBd VeC|

(The essence of Western civilization is: power lies in knowledge; [and] the essence of
Hindu civilization is: knowledge leads to salvation. Two races started their journey along
the same route with two different targets. The Westerners have attained power; have we
attained salvation? Undoubtedly, the same journey has produced different results. The
Europeans have achieved progress because they wanted power. We have fallen down
because we were indifferent to power. Europeans’ vision is down to earth; they have
triumphed in this life. Our vision aims at an after-world; hence, we could not succeed in
this life. Whether we will triumph in the next world is debatable).

Thus, to Bankimchandra like many of his contemporaries, the essential difference

between the East and the West is cultural. Profoundly materialist in character, modern
European culture sings the glories of power and progress. It is based on the attributes of
science and technology. On the contrary, Eastern cultures are fundamentally spiritual.
That is why they are dismissed in the west as backward and inferior. Nevertheless, the
fact remains that if the West excels in materiality, the East excels in spirituality.
Bankimchandra’s position here is not much different from that of the Orientalists and
like them, he also reckons the difference of the Oriental i.e. the Hindu and the Bengali,
from ‘modern Western man’.86

Bankimchandra alleged that foreign writers – that is, the British and Muslim historians,
falsified India’s glorious past. As Ranajit Guha points out, between the two,
Bankimchandra blamed it more on the latter. He characterized them as liars and Hindu-
haters. The past, writes Guha, was thus branded as a Hindu past. It was distorted, wrote
Bankimchandra, because the foreign historians failed to acknowledge the former glory of
the Bengali people. Bankimchandra here refers to two kinds of glory: i) spiritual and
intellectual; ii) physical. He particularly emphasizes on bahubol i.e. physical prowess.
Discussing his different essays on history and historiography, Guha has shown that the
exercise of bahubol was, for Bankimchandra, primarily a demonstration of Hindu

79
superiority to Mussalmans in fighting strength. He limited the exercise of bahubol to the
pre-colonial history of India. He was not interested in extending it into the period of
British paramountcy in spite of the large incidence of armed conflict between the Raj and
the people. In other words, though he was writing as to how a subject nation could
liberate itself from the yoke of colonial rule, he refused to relate it to British colonialism.
In Guha’s own words, “ The excision of colonial rule from the history of bahubol, hence
the exclusion of bahubol from the history of colonial rule, prevented the agenda for an
alternative historiography from being put into effect even as it was formulated and urged
with such fervour.”87

Bankimchandra, however, believed that the Oriental character was not beyond
transformation. This transformation of the so-called backward culture of the (Hindu)
nation is possible by taking on the valuable attributes of western civilization. In other
words, backwardness of Oriental character is not historically immutable.88

But how far is such imitation of another culture acceptable? Does it not involve a risk of
losing one’s own cultural identity? Many contemporaries of Bankimchandra did not
approve of blind Westernization of Bengali social customs and practices. Rajnarayan
Bose, for example, was highly critical of colonial modernity. He thought that there could
not be one single format of modernity irrespective of space, time, environment and social
formation. Modernity might be different in keeping with different social values and
conventions.89

Thus, Rajnarayan Bose, as Partha Chatterjee puts it, castigated the newly educated
classes of Bengal for mimicking English manners and life-styles. However,
Bankimchandra thought otherwise. He held that not all imitations were bad. Responding
to Bose’s sarcasm, he wrote in an essay entitled Anukaran (Imitation) that the Bengalees
did not deserve as much criticism as they had. Imitation was not necessarily a bad thing.
Initially, the Europeans also largely imitated the Romans. It was good that the new
Bengalees were imitating the English men.90

With this position in mind, Chatterjee argues that while in Bankimchandra’s nationalist
thought the thematic of Orientalism dominates, there is still room for a specific
subjectivity to the East in which it is dynamic, sovereign, and unvanquished. The west

80
was great in its worship of Reason, science and technology. But only materiality cannot
be what culture demands. Spiritualism also matters. European Enlightenment had
nothing to do with this. In the spiritual aspect of culture, the East was superior – and
hence undominated. This approach of a cultural domain of superiority for the East was in
time associated with the national struggle against Western political authority.91

Bankimchandra asserted that British superiority of force in the world lay in a superior
culture. To match and overcome that superiority, Indian society must regenerate her
national culture. In an essay named ‘Bharat Kalamka’(The Stigma of India), he observed
that Indians had learnt many things from their ‘great benefactors’ -- the British. Some of
them were priceless. Two such gems were love for freedom (÷atǽYipãyta ,
swatantrapriyata) and construction of nation. (jaitpãitòa , jatipratistha). 92 As already
pointed out, in response to this, Guha has asked a significant question: Why were these
two endowments not used by Bankimchandra to develop a critique of colonial rule
which, too, was bestowed on us by the ‘great benefactors’ (paramopakari) ? Guha is of
opinion that the need for a critique of colonialism repeatedly flashed in Bankimchandra’s
work and he evaded that critique.93

In this connection, Partha chatterjee has cautioned us that it would be wrong to think that
Indian nationalism took the form of Hindu nationalism under the influence of some
premodern religious notion. If anything, the ideology that made Indian nationalism
synonymous with Hindu nationalism was entirely modern, rationalist and historicist in
nature. Not just that. As a modern ideology, it advocated that the state must be armed
with the principles of unity and sovereignty and it should play a central role in the
modernization of society. In his view, as the appeal of this historiography is not religious
but political, the framework of its reasoning is wholly secular. The notion of ‘Hindu-
ness’ here, elicits Chatterjee, should not necessarily be characterized as religious.
Because anti-Brahmanical religions like Buddhism and Jainism are considered Hindu in
this historiography. Only Christianity and Islam are excluded as they came to India from
outside. The question that remains is: what would be the policy towards those who are
excluded from this (Hindu) nation? One major answer is what lies central to the modern
state in the life of the nation: majoritarianism. “The majority “community” ”, writes
Chatterjee, “ is Hindu; the others are minorities. State policy must therefore reflect this

81
preponderance, and the minorities must accept the leadership and protection of the
majority.” 94

As Chatterjee argues, this theory is not much modern. It is as old as nationalism itself.
Examples can be cited from the writing of another great thinker of the nineteenth
century, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. He wrote a history of India that was revealed to him in
a dream (Swapnolabdho bharatbarsher itihas) in 1876. In his narrative, the Afghan
leader Ahmad Shah Abdali is found to have been facing the forces of Maratha king
Ramchandra at Panipat. Amidst battle, a messenger from the Maratha camp approaches
Abdali and conveys his master’s message that the Hindus are ready to forget all the past
ill treatments of the Mussalmans and forgive them. By forgiving the Muslims, the
Hindus have always suffered in the past. Still, they would not go against their national
character. Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay then puts the following words in Abdali’s mouth:
" dUt ! tuim mHarañä-Ÿsnapitek igya bl, Vim tƒaHar ˆdar bYbHaer …kaÇ» mu©
H†lam Î Vr kKnw Bartbàx Vº¡meN ˆdYm kirb na| " (Messenger ! Go and tell your
general that I am profoundly impressed at his generous behaviour. I will not invade India
any more).

At a later stage, we see how the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam humbly abdicated the
throne of India in favour of the Maratha Rajadhiraj Ramchandra. As one of the courtiers
said,

BartBUim Zidw iHÆdujatIyidegr† ZTaàT matâBUim, Zidw iHÆdura†

†ƒHar geàB jnMgãHN kiryaeCn, tTaip muslmaenraw Vr †ƒHar pr neHn,
†in ˆƒHaidgekw Vpn beQ DarN kirya bûkal pãitpalnkirya ViseteCn| At…b
muslmaenraw †ƒHar pailt sÇ»an| 95

(Although India is the very motherland of the Hindus who were born in this land, the
king does not consider the Muslims foreigners. He has been lovingly patronizing them
for long. Therefore, the Muslims are also his children).

Bankimchandra’s vision of a radical rejuvenation of national culture, writes Chatterjee,

implied an elitism of the intelligentsia. There was a point of tension in the nationalist
thought in India in its infancy. This is what Chatterjee calls a contradiction of the

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thematic and the problematic of nationalism itself. As he explains, there had been an
unsolvable divergence between the modern and the national. Regardless of their
ideological positions, all nationalist thinkers of nineteenth century were ‘equally
prisoners of the rationalism, historicism and scientism of the nationalist thematic’. It was
the ideal of the true intellectual that could synthesise the modern and the national. But in
reality, it was impossible to translate that ideal into concrete political terms. Liberal, pro-
Western thinkers, who spoke of the modern, were of the view that India must be
modernized first under colonial rule. They were anxious to collaborate with the West and
share power with British personnel in India. On the contrary, those who emphasized on
the national asked for a cultural distinction of India from the modern West. In
Chatterjee’s opinion, both possibilities were inherent in Bankimchandra’s thinking. 96

Chatterjee has critically reviewed what he describes as the narrow elitism of the
intelligentsia. The Indian bourgeoisie sought to characterize the nation as a political
entity. This meant the building up of a national consensus for self-government in India.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci problematized the state in terms of coercion and
hegemony and for him struggle for power had the meaning of domination as well as
intellectual-moral leadership. Judging by this Gramscian polemic, the new bourgeois
class in India needed to establish an intellectual and moral leadership over the vast
masses of peasantry and involve them in the politics of nationalism. The problem was,
however, to invent ways for coalescing together the attributes of peasant consciousness
on the one hand and the forms of enlightened nationalist politics on the other. There
could be two options: to transform peasant politics; or else, to appropriate peasant
support for building up a nation-state. The nationalist elite availed of the second path and
staged what Chatterjee calls after Gramsci, ‘a passive revolution’.97 They mobilized
popular forces in the freedom movement but kept them away from the configuration of
the state. In other words, a state was projected which would represent the peasant
masses, but would not accept them as a part of it. Herein comes up the point of Gandhian
intervention in Indian politics.98

Chatterjee illustrates the ‘moment of manoeuvre’ in the course of a discussion of the

thought of Gandhiji. As far as Indian nationalism is concerned, Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas
were profoundly different from those of Bankimchandra’s. Gandhi never had confidence
in Western modernity. Instead, he believed that the modern civilization of the West –
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though it highly spoke of human values like dignity, equality, freedom, and civility –
stood on massive violence. Incidents like colonial conquests, slavery, the two world
wars, or the Nazi ethnic cleansing were certainly no accidents or aberrations. The West
also made an obsession for reason. In his own words, “... rationalism is a hideous
monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. … I plead not for the suppression of
reason, but an appreciation of its inherent limits.” In his view, while giving too much
importance to science as a form of knowledge, rationalism discounted and marginalized
many other important human values and forms of knowledge.99

Nor did Gandhi believe that India would achieve progress and freedom by introducing a
modern culture for the nation. Unlike other Congressmen, Gandhi never stood for the
modernization of India. While the intention of the Congress was to have reason,
enlightenment and modernity, Gandhi offered an altogether different path of
transformation. He clarified his position in Hind Swaraj, the pamphlet he wrote in
Gujarati in 1909. As Gyan Prakash puts it, Hind Swaraj is a revealing text. Published
first in Indian Opinion in two parts and translated into English by Gandhi himself, it was
‘the most utopian of Gandhi’s writings’ and was planned as an intervention in nationalist
politics.100 Romain Rolland, who was sympathetic to and yet critical of Gandhi’s
political philosophy, thought that Hind Swaraj contained the kernel of Gandhi’s thought:
‘the negation of Progress and also of European science.’101 Chatterjee reads this book ‘as
a text in which Gandhi’s nationalism can be shown to rest on a fundamental critique of
civil society.’ Incidentally, in Marxist vein, Chatterjee understands ‘civil society’ to
incorporate economy.

As Rajat Kanta Ray points out, the Hind Swaraj signified a substitute for modernity.102
Regarding Western modernity, Gandhi’s comment was, “Machinery is the chief symbol
of modern civilization. It represents a great sin.”103 “Mr. Gandhi”, remarked a critic in an
article entitled ‘Gandhism and After’, published in The Hindustan Review, “is a sworn
enemy of all civilization…”104 Gandhi used the term Swaraj not in a political sense, but
105
in a moral sense. As he wrote, “It is Swaraj when we rule ourselves.” “And yet”,
writes Ray, “ this moral concept has profound, and highly disturbing implications for
politics … Politics is about power, power for the nation so far as Congress is concerned.
Gandhi proposes to abolish power altogether from the centre, in an implicitly anti-
national design. No longer will power be available for national reconstruction through
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national planning. On the contrary, national (anti-national?) reconstruction will be
achieved by the abolition of the state. … Power would then revert to the community
ruled by custom, especially the village community of his dream.” 106 As Gandhiji himself
puts it, “Would there be State power in an ideal society or would such a society be
Stateless? I think the question is futile. … We might remember though that a Stateless
society does not exist anywhere in the world. If such a society is possible it can be
established first only in India. For attempts have been made in India towards bringing
about such a society … The only way is for those who believe in it to set the
example.”107

No wonder, Gandhi proposed to disband the Congress party. In his vision, independence
of India was to begin at the bottom i.e. at the village level. Every village must be a
republic or panchayat. It should enjoy full powers. There would be neither
aggressiveness nor arrogance on anybody’s part. To refer to Ray again, here was a
humanism that far surpassed nationalism and moved well past modernity. This emphasis
on village instead of on modern nation-state is also discernible in the writing of
Rabindranath Tagore. In his Swadeshi samaj address at the Minerva and Curzon theatres
of Calcutta in 1904, the poet urged the people of India to turn away from old-style
politics. As he said, instead of trying ineffectively to please the British, volunteers should
rush to the villages and enlighten the masses socially and politically in the village fairs
through ‘magic-lantern lectures’. More importantly, they should revive our traditional
Samaj, directing all constructive work through it once again. 108

The “Swadeshi Samaj”, writes Sumit Sarkar, “created a sensation with its combination of
eloquence and practical suggestion.” 109 Obviously, some critics such as Prithwischandra
Ray or Pramathanath Raychaudhuri held that Rabindranath was romanticizing the
traditional village society.110 Sarkar himself thinks that the poet was clearly seeking the
bond of unity with the country explicitly through the Hindu religion and Hindu
society.111

If we come back to Gandhi again, we can see how his notion of Western modernity
influenced his nationalist thought. Citing numerous examples from Gandhi’s writings,
Partha Chatterjee has focused on the difference of his nationalist ideology from that of
other Congress leaders. As already stated above, in breaking up the ‘presumed unity’ of
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nationalist thought, Chatterjee describes this stage of passive revolution as the ‘moment
of manoeuvre’. It is where the ‘national’ is historically secured by decrying the
‘modern’.112 Chatterjee takes to the Gramscian framework while analyzing Gandhi’s
writings. As he himself points out, the analytical framework he uses borrows mainly
from the ideas of Gramsci on the relation between the fundamental classes and the
‘people-nation’. The final objective of the dominant classes is hegemony. They achieve
it by building up a ‘national-popular’ consensus and by staging the ‘passive
revolution’.113

In the specific Indian context, nationalist thought is shaped and even contained by what
Edward Said described as the ‘dominating framework’ of Orientalism. To put it very
briefly, Orientalism was ‘ a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the
Orient.’ As a thought process, it is ‘based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”.’ As
Chatterjee puts it, it is true that nationalism in colonial countries count on opposition to
foreign i.e. Western, rule. But this opposition takes place within a body of knowledge
about the East and this knowledge system is identical with Orientalism in its theoretical
framework as well as its representational structure.114

Gandhi’s way of looking at the state and forms of rule had been no doubt highly original.
He made a serious attempt to mobilize people against the colonial regime in his own
terms of non-violence and satyagraha. An unarmed people became familiar with the
effective techniques of non-violent protest against the institutions of state aggression. In
fact, the most celebrated concept in the Gandhian ideology was the concept of ahimsa.
“In its application to politics” -- writes Chatterjee – “ahimsa was also about ‘intense
political activity’ by large masses of people. … Ahimsa was the necessary complement
to the concept of satyagraha which both limited it and, at the same time, made it
something more than ‘purely and simply civil disobedience’. Ahimsa was the rule for
concretizing the ‘truth’ of satyagraha. … Ahimsa, indeed, was the concept … which
supplied Gandhism with a theory of politics, enabling it to become the ideology of a
national political movement. It was the organizing principle for a ‘science’ of politics – a
science wholly different from all current conceptions of politics … It was the moral
framework for solving every practical problem of the organized political movement.” 115

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“Ahimsa with me”, said Gandhi, “is a creed, the breath of life. But it is never as a creed
that I placed it before India or, for that matter, before anyone except in casual or informal
talks. I placed it before the Congress as a political weapon, to be employed for the
solutions of practical problems.”116 Elsewhere Gandhi writes, “What I want to impress
on everyone is that I do not want India to reach her goal through questionable means.
Whether that is possible or not is another question. It is sufficient for my present purpose
if the person who thinks out the plan and leads the people is absolutely above board and
has non-violence and truth in him.” 117

Gandhi believed that as a type of popular agitation, satyagraha did not merely imply
passive resistance. It signified a lawful, ethical and honest form of political action by the
people against the wrongs of the state. It was pointed out by many that peasants did not
always conform to the principle of non-violence in their fight against domination.
Dismissing this objection Gandhi wrote:

It is said that it is a very difficult, if not an altogether impossible, task to educate ignorant
peasants in satyagraha and that it is full of perils, for it is a very arduous business to
transform unlettered ignorant people from one condition to another. Both the arguments
are just silly. The people of India are perfectly fit to receive the training of satyagraha.
India has knowledge of Dharma, and where there is knowledge of Dharma, satyagraha is a
very simple matter … Some have a fear that once people get involved in satyagraha, they
may at a later stage take arms. This fear is illusory. From the path of satyagraha, a
transition to the path of a-satyagraha is impossible. It is possible of course that some
people who believe in armed activity may mislead the satyagrahis by infiltrating into their
ranks and later making them take to arms. This is possible in all enterprises. But as
compared to other activities, it is less likely to happen in satyagraha, for their motives soon
get exposed and when the people are not ready to take up arms, it becomes almost
impossible to lead them on to that terrible path.”118

Chatterjee argues that still the Gandhian form of politics ended in a fiasco. While Gandhi
was successful in offering new techniques of mass movement against colonial rule, his
aims remained unfulfilled. He taught people non-violence as a weapon against state
terrorism. But he did not address the pivotal issue of how a state could lawfully employ

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violence against wrongdoers. Gandhi, in fact, failed to theorize the issue. In the absence
of such a theory, notes Chatterjee, Gandhian thinking remained a non-modern form of
resistance. It could never become an alternative form of the modern state. In his view, the
key question here should be concerned with the chance of a ‘different modernity’. As
Chatterjee saw it in the mid 1980s, there were no doubt many other options of mobilizing
the masses different from the Western standard. However, judging by the outcomes, such
new means of mobilization were disappointing. These appeared to be mostly
replications of the modern state in the West.119

Chatterjee explains the ‘moment of arrival’, referred to above, in terms of power. This
moment comes when nationalist thought achieves an ideological unity through the united
life of the state. “Nationalist discourse at its moment of arrival” -- remarks Chatterjee --
“is passive revolution uttering its own life history.” He illustrates this point in the course
of a study of the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru who placed the national state at the core of
his nationalist thought. Chatterjee argues that Nehru’s ideology was essentially guided
by the principles of state-autonomy and social justice. His argument was that ‘social
justice for all cannot be provided within the old framework because it is antiquated,
decadent and incapable of dynamism. What is necessary is to create a new framework of
institutions which can embody the spirit of progress, or, a synonym, modernity … Hence
the principal political task before the nation is to establish a sovereign national state.’120

In Nehru’s vision, the Indian state or Bharat Mata (‘Mother India’) was to include the
huge crowd of the peasantry. In The Discovery of India he wrote, “Sometimes as I
reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me: Bharat Mata ki Jai –
‘Victory to Mother India!’ … Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions
of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of this Bharat
Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly
121
soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had a great discovery.”
However, at the same time, as Nehru saw it, the essence of peasant-consciousness was
unreason. It had to be understood in terms of ‘Otherness’. In Chatterjee’s view, Nehru
believed that this consciousness was beyond the reach of bourgeois rationality. He
thought that left to themselves, the peasant disturbances were disgracefully violent.
Peasants were definitely to be mobilized. But a rational programme alone could never

88
achieve this mobilization. It required the intervention of a political genius. It required the
‘spellbinding’ of a Gandhi.122

For Nehru, Gandhi was no ordinary leader. His political philosophy did not primarily rest
on the gift of reason. Rather, he seemed to have magical powers with which he could
hypnotize the popular mind. He certainly had an unusual power to grasp and mould mass
psychology. Nehru was troubled to place it within the framework of reason. As he
comments,

Ever since Gandhiji appeared on the Indian political scene, there has been no going back in
popularity for him, so far as the masses are concerned. … Consciously and deliberately
meek and humble, yet he was full of power and authority, and he knew it, and at times he
was imperious enough, issuing commands which had to be obeyed. … Whether his
audience consisted of one person or a thousand, the charm and magnetism of the man
passed on to it, and each one had a feeling of communion with the speaker. This feeling
had little to do with the mind, though the appeal to the mind was not wholly ignored. But
mind and reason definitely had second place. … Even some of Gandhiji’s phrases
sometimes jarred upon me – thus his frequent reference to Rama Raj as a golden age which
was to return. But I was powerless to intervene, and I consoled myself with the thought
that Gandhiji used the words because they were well known and understood by the masses.
He had an amazing knack of reaching the heart of the people …123

This particular image of ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ in popular consciousness obsessed the

nationalist discourse. Shahid Amin in a brilliant article had shown how the nationalist
ideas and narratives during the days of non-cooperation (1920-22) took advantage of the
personality of a ‘saintly Gandhi’ who suffered for the people and so, in return, could
demand their obedience to his rulings. The contemporary nationalist writings vividly
portray peasant perceptions of Gandhi, which were overwhelmed with devotion to him.
As Gandhi toured in northern India in the winter of 1920-22, his Secretary Mahadev
Desai, touched by the ‘boundless love’ of the people for Gandhiji, wrote in his diary:

It is impossible to put in language the exuberance of love which Gandhiji … experienced

in Bihar. Our train on the B.N.W.Railway line stopped at all stations and there was not a
single station which was not crowded with hundreds of people at that time. Even women,
who never stir out of their homes, did not fail to present themselves so that they could see

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 and hear him. A huge concourse of students would everywhere smother Gandhiji with their
enthusiasm. … At some others (stations), we came across railway officers who would not
give the green flag, when our train came within their jurisdiction, in order to have and let
others have Gandhiji’s darshan. … We have met with even policemen who had the
courage to approach Gandhiji to salute him or touch his hand, and CID’s [sic] also who
would plaintively say, ‘We have taken to this dirty work for the sake of the sinning flesh,
but please do accept these five rupees’.124

Regarding this tour again, the following passage from Gandhi’s early biographer
D.G.Tengulkar calls our attention: “… In a Bihar village when Gandhi and his party
were stranded in the train, an old woman came seeking out Gandhi. ‘Sire, I am now one
hundred and four’, she said, ‘and my sight has grown dim. I have visited the various holy
places. In my own home I have dedicated two temples. Just as we had Rama and Krishna
as avatars, so also, Mahatma Gandhi has appeared as an avatar, I hear. Until I have seen
him death will not appear’. This simple faith moved India’s millions who greeted him
everywhere with the cry, ‘Mahatma Gandhi-ki jai’. Prostitutes of Barisal, the Marwari
merchants of Calcutta, Oriya coolies, railway strikers, Santals eager to present khadi
chaddars, all claimed his attention.”125

Gandhi’s return journey from Gorakhpur led to scenes that are more dramatic. Mahadev
Desai writes, “The train started from Gorakhpur at 8.30 p.m. at night. … It was a train
that halted at every station. … Hordes and hordes of people began to rush upon our
compartment…. At every station peasants with long lathis and torches in their hands
would come to us and raise cries loud enough to split the very drums of our ears. Of
course, all of us in the compartment were making as many appeals for quiet as we
possibly could. But whoever would care to listen to us?

“Many of these devotees do not even know how their ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ looks like. A
few of them thrust themselves into our compartment, and began to bawl out, ‘Who is
Mahatma Gandhiji?’ ‘Who is Mahatma Gandhiji?’ I got desperate and said ‘I’. They
were satisfied, bowed down to me and left the compartment! What a difference between
my presumptuousness and these people’s untainted love!” 126

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Exploring such ‘darshan-seeking scenes’ Shahid Amin rightly points out that they were
described in the nationalist Hindi papers with a distinct political motive. The nationalist
press was anxious to establish that the sadharan janta i.e., the subalterns had only one
particular role to play – to have the darshan of the Mahatma and become his devoted
followers. As far as organization of the nationalist movement was concerned, all
initiatives should be assigned to the urban intelligentsia. Thus, during Gandhi’s visit to
Gorakhpur in February 1921, Shyam Dhar Misra -- the person who received Gandhi at
the Bhatni Junction on behalf of the local congressmen – briefed the patriotic paper
Swadesh in this way:

At Bhatni Gandhiji addressed the local public and then the train started for Gorakhpur.
There were not less than 15 to 20,000 people at Nunkhar, Deoria, Gauri Bazar, Chauri
Chaura and Kusmhi [stations]. … At Deoria there were about 35-40,000 people. … Some,
overcome with their love, were seen to be crying. … Outside the Gorakhpur station the
Mahatma was stood on a high carriage and people had a good darshan of him for a couple
of minutes. 127

It is then clear that the prosperous and influential followers of Gandhiji – whom Amin
calls ‘political intermediaries’ in this context -- manoeuvered to make political
intervention even in the relationship between peasant devotees and their Mahatma.
Hence, so much coverage of the “fantastic flow of bhakti” (devotion) on the part of the
subalterns during Gandhi’s visit. Mahavir Prasad Poddar, a patriotic Gorakhpuri
merchant, reported in an editorial of the Swadesh:

It had not occurred to us in our wildest dreams that the same Gorakhpur which was
politically dormant would suddenly wake up like this. A crowd of 2 - 2.5 lakhs for the
darshan of Gandhiji is no ordinary thing. It can probably be said that this is the biggest
crowd that has ever gathered for the darshan of the Mahatma. … the janta came with
devotion (bhakti) in their hearts and returned with feelings and ideas (bhav).The name of
Guru-Gandhi has now spread in all four corners of the district … 128

The above passage explains the powerful urban elements’ attitude towards the common
people. It demands of the janta not only bhakti, but also bhav, that is, as suggested by
Veena Das, an urge to action. The nationalist press purposely circulated rumours and

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 stories about Gandhi’s supernatural powers. Several tales were published in the pages of
the Swadesh in which the British appeared as a “weak-kneed race, morally afraid of the
non-violent Mahatma.” The caption of a report published in the Swadeshi on 30 January
1921 was Swapn mein Mahatma Gandhi: Angrez nange bhage.129 Even the pro-zamindar
paper Gyan Shakti anxiously reported some incidents, which the paper considered
menacing ‘signs of an impending clash between the peasants and the landlords’. One
incident was as follows:

‘One night people … were shouting … Swaraj has been attained. The English had taken a
bet with Gandhiji that they would grant swaraj if Gandhiji could come out of fire
[unhurt]. Gandhiji took hold of the tail of a calf and went through fire. Now swaraj has
been attained. It was also announced that now only four annas or eight annas a bigha
would have to be paid in rent. We have also heard that some peasants are insisting that
they will not pay more than eight annas a bigha as rent.’130

Amin is right to observe that the reporting of such rumours in the Congress paper
Swadesh implies that interested parties actively spread these. Amin has referred to the
French historian of the Revolution of 1789, Georges Lefebvre. The latter in his study of
the Great Fear of 1789 in revolutionary France points out how journalists instilled
rumours ‘with a new strength by putting… them into print’. In the context of Gorakhpur,
the rural janta obviously did not believe the rumours from any sense of faith on
Swadesh. They had done this because such stories were in perfect harmony with their
convictions about marvels and miracles, about right and wrong.131

Here one very interesting thing is the response of the Gandhian Congress. Amin observes
that what Gandhi said at the ‘massive gatherings of peasants’ in Fyzabad and Gorakhpur
had enough ambiguity in it ‘to cause semantic slides’. What did Gandhi say to the
mammoth rally of over 1.5 lakhs in UP? He condemned peasant violence in Awadh in
strong terms. The report in Swadesh goes like this:

What happened in Fyzabad? What happened in Rae Bareli? We should know these
things. By doing what we have done with our own hands we have committed a wrong, a
great wrong. By raising the lakri [i.e. lathi] we have done a bad thing. … We can’t get
swaraj by using the lakri. We cannot get swaraj by pitting our own devilishness

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 (shaitaniyat) against the satanic government. Our 30 crore lakris are no match against
their aeroplanes and guns… Our kisan bothers have committed a mistake. They have
caused great anguish to my brother Jawahar Lal. If further difficulties [of this sort] are
put in our way then you shall see that that very day it would become impossible for
Gandhi to live in Hindustan. I shall have to do penance – this is a peaceful struggle. Only
after I retire to the Himalayas can it become a violent struggle. … Right now we should
forget about ‘social boycott’. The time has not yet arrived for such actions. …132

Gyanendra Pandey has noted the ‘Instructions’ that Gandhi issued to the peasants of UP
during his visit to that province. Five of them deserve mention here.
1. ‘We may not hurt anybody. We may not use our sticks against anybody. We may not
use abusive language or exercise any other undue pressure.’
2. ‘We may not loot shops.’
3. ‘We should influence our opponents by kindness, not by using physical force nor
stopping their water supply nor the services of the barber and the washerman.’
4. ‘We may not stop railway trains nor forcibly enter them without tickets.’
5. ‘In the event of any of our leaders being arrested, we may not prevent his arrest nor
create any disturbance. We shall not lose our cause by the Government arresting our
leaders; we shall certainly lose it if we become mad and do violence.’133

Such Instructions had their specific context. For example, the first two were issued for
equalizing ‘peasant activism’ in Rae Bareli in early January 1921 and in Faizabad after a
while. The overall concern of Gandhiji was definitely to ensure non-violence in all
circumstances. As Pandey observes, in his effort to avoid violence, Gandhi assailed the
very action that had first revealed the organized power of the peasantry to the British
government and, more importantly, to the peasants themselves. It is equally interesting to
note that in Gandhi’s view, the peasants had the responsibility of maintaining non-
violence. For any collapse in the event of a clash with the authorities, they should bear
responsibility. Moreover, the third injunction shows that Gandhi was troubled about any
likely altercation between the peasant and the landlord. What is also notable is that the
rumours that were given extreme priority in the nationalist press, were cleverly used, as
already pointed out above, to carry out the function of spreading a particular notion. That
was, writes Pandey, the projection of an ‘outside leader’, a Peasant King or a modern

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substitute who would appear to set free the people from their thrall. Hence, the myth of
Gandhi that ‘someone’ has defied the powers that exist.134

It will be pertinent to come back to Nehru once again. Chatterjee has discussed how
Nehru toyed with the idea of appropriating Gandhiji’s magnetic influence on the
peasantry in the task of mobilizing them into the national movement. Nehru knew that in
the struggle for an independent and united national state, the bourgeois leadership needed
to gain the confidence of the peasants. For this purpose, the language of the elites would
not do. A new language must be used which the peasants understood. Hence,
appropriation of Gandhi’s charisma. After all, Gandhi alone had the brilliance to reach
the people and he was to be allowed to act on behalf of national leadership. The latter,
however, would pick up their command again at a convenient moment. Nehru writes of
this strategy in his Autobiography clearly: “He was a very difficult person to understand,
sometimes his language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern. But we felt
that we knew him well enough to realise he was a great and unique man and a glorious
leader, and having put our faith in him we gave him an almost blank cheque, for the time
being at least. Often we discussed his fads and peculiarities among ourselves and said,
half-humorously, that when Swaraj came these fads must not be encouraged.” 135

This is how Gandhism – originally a critique of the concept of Western civil society –
came to terms with nationalism. Gandhi with all his ‘fads and peculiarities’, with his
‘definitely religious outlook on life’, intervened in the politics of the nation. He
spellbound the people and that completely changed the character of the national
movement. He ‘effected a vast psychological revolution’. He emerged to ‘represent the
peasant masses of India’.136 We like to conclude this point with the following comment
from Chatterjee:

But in the final analysis, it was the logical, the rational, the scientific, which had to be the
basis for one’s understanding of the real progression of history. The resort to an
incomprehensible power which could rouse the masses was only a functional loop, a
necessary detour into the domain of the irrational and the unknown. Soon the rational
path of real history would have to be resumed in order to move on to the next historical
stage. … The perspective was that of the creation of a new national state. And this could
only be undertaken in the domain of rational politics. And it was obvious, therefore, that

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 Gandhi could no longer be appropriate guide at this stage of the journey. … He (Gandhi)
was ‘more or less of a philosophical anarchist’ and however functional such a philosophy
might be in the stage of rousing the masses to political resistance, it could hardly be a
reliable guide when the immediate task was to create a new state.137

Chatterjee has further developed the theory of Indian nationalism in his 1994 publication
The Nation and Its Fragments. Here he speaks of two domains of action of the
nationalist elite: the material and the spiritual. The spiritual is the ‘inner’ domain in
which nationalism sought “to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not
Western.” In his view, this was the true and essential domain where nationalism did not
allow colonial intervention. In other words, the elites strongly opposed colonial
intervention in such matters of ‘national culture’ as language, religion, family life etc.
Therefore, the nation was already sovereign here. On the other hand, the material is the
domain of the ‘outside’, which was characterized by the institutions of the colonial state:
law, administration, economy and statecraft. In this domain, the nationalist elites had
little scope to avoid the influence of western models because the West had proved its
superiority over the East in these respects. In the outer world, nationalism disputed the
colonial rule of difference. In the inner world, it took the trouble to homogenize Indian
society by creating consent through the dominance of the space of subaltern opposition.
Chatterjee argues that the two domains of elite and subaltern politics thus need to be
analyzed not in their separateness, but in their “mutually conditioned historicities”. In his
observation, the dynamics of this historical project is completely missed in conventional
histories, which view the story of nationalism simply as a contest for political power.138

Disputing what he calls the revisionist argument of neo-colonialist historians such as

Burton Stein and David Washbrook, Chatterjee speaks of the problem of nationalism and
colonial difference. These historians, according to him, seek to revise the history of
colonialism in India. Unlike colonialist and nationalist historians, they argue that colonial
rule did not usher in any basic rupture in Indian history. Burton Stein, for example,
argues that it is wrong to say that colonial rule in India was completely different from all
prior states. In other words, there was a perfect continuity from the precolonial to the
early colonial period. Citing the work of Frank Perlin, Chris Bayly, and David
Washbrook, Stein concludes that the eighteenth century was not a period of turmoil and

95
disintegration. If anything, there was “economic vigour, even development”. Stein
describes the time from 1750 to 1850 as a ‘period of transition’.139

Similarly, Chris Bayly in his review of the early colonial period in India speaks of the
‘progressive’ impact of colonialism. Bayly argues that born in precolonial India,
capitalism matured into its modern form as it responded to the forces that the European
world economy had produced. According to Bayly, this perspective helps us make an
account that runs from the precolonial past to the postcolonial present in which the
people of India are the subjects of history.140 Washbrook makes the claim louder by
talking about what he calls ‘historical theory’. This theory – as Chatterjee analyzes it –
claims that not all forms of capital formation do essentially bring about modern
industrialism. Industrial capital grew up in England, Western Europe and North America
under some definite conditions. Unfortunately, says Washbrook, Eurocentric historical
theories have tried to find out similar developments everywhere else in the world.
Washbrook holds that the similarities – and not the differences – between the
development of capitalism in Europe and that in India were very striking. Precolonial
economic and social institutions in India did not hinder capitalist growth. If anything,
they reinforced most of the forms that were linked with early modern capital. True, there
were cultural differences between India and Europe. But Indian institutions, too, were
“capable of supplying broadly similar economic functions.” Thus, observes Washbrook,
“rarely in history can capital and property have secured such rewards and such prestige
for so little risk and so little responsibility as in the society crystallizing in South Asia in
the Victorian age.” He concludes, “Colonialism was the logical outcome of South Asia’s
own history of capitalist development.” 141

Emphasizing colonial difference, Chatterjee challenges the revisionist assumptions. Here

are some important excerpts from his writing:

The tables have been turned. Once colonialism as an economic and political formation is
shown to have been produced by an indigenous history of capitalist development,
everything that followed from colonial rule becomes, by the ineluctable logic of “historical
theory,” an integral part of that same indigenous history. Thus, the restructuring of the
Indian economy in the period between 1820 and 1850, when all of the principal features of
colonial underdevelopment emerged to preclude once and for all the possibilities of

96
 transition to modern industrialization, must be seen not as a process carried out by an
external extractive force but as one integral to the peculiar history of Indian capitalism. …
The late colonial regime, by upholding the privileges of capital, destroying the viability of
petty manufacturers, pulling down the remnants of already decrepit community
institutions, and consolidating the formation of a mass of overexploited peasants constantly
reduced to lower and lower levels of subsistence, made the transition more or less
impossible.
On the cultural side, the colonial regime instituted a “traditionalization of Indian society by
its rigid codification of “custom” and “tradition,” its freezing of the categories of social
classification such as caste, and its privileging of “scriptural” interpretations of social law
at the expense of the fluidity of local community practices. The result was the creation by
colonial rule of a social order that bore a striking resemblance to its own caricature of
“traditional India.
Instead of saying, as do his predecessors in the discipline of political economy, that India
was so different that it was incapable of capitalism and therefore required British
colonialism to bring it into the orbit of world history, Washbrook has simply inverted the
order of similarity and difference within the same discursive framework. In the process, he
has also managed to erase colonialism out of existence.” 142

In the conventional historiography, political struggle with colonial rule came to be the
dominant discourse. The dynamics of such history lay in the assumption that the elites in
India were contesting with colonialism for political sovereignty since the inception of
nationalism. Here nationalism is thought to have been struggling for a possible space in
the modern colonial state. It has the compulsion of copying the West for selecting its
own ‘modular’ form. In the subaltern approach, however, the real thrust lies in the
cultural difference of Asia and Africa with the West. For, our nationalism had already
had its own domain of cultural sovereignty within the perimeters of the colonial society.
It has been pointed out that Indian nationalism, while highlighting the symbols of this
cultural difference with Europe and North America, demanded that Indians must not be
differentiated with the colonial rulers in India. That is to say, the initial task of
nationalism in India was, on the one hand, to preserve its sovereignty over the inner
domain of national life and, on the other hand, “to erase the marks of colonial difference”
in the material domain of the colonial state. On the contrary, the rulers in India wanted to
perpetuate their ‘alienness’ because this could fulfill their mission as a ‘modern regime
of power’. By challenging ‘the rule of colonial difference in the domain of the state’,

97
nationalism is supposed to have reasserted the claims to universality of the ‘modern
regime of power’. Hence, nationalism after 1947 inherited the conglomerates of colonial
rule in the new state of India with this project of a modern regime.143

Gyan Prakash’s intervention in this regard deserves mention. Chatterjee in his

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Chapter 5: ‘The Moment of Arrival: Nehru
and the Passive Revolution’) has argued at some length that Nehru the modernizer did
‘sideline Gandhi the nonmodernist after having utilized him for mobilizing the
masses’.144 Prakash differs from this position. In his view, the nation-state was immanent
in the very hegemonic project of imagining and normalizing a national community. As
he maintains, there was no basic contradiction between the inner sphere of the nation and
its outer life as a nation-state. The former in fact survived in the latter at an abstract level.
According to Prakash, what brought together Gandhi and Nehru – two men with widely
different views on modernity – was the imperative to represent Indian nationalism as a
critique of the West. While Gandhi’s opposition to modern science and technology is
well known, writes Prakash, it is seldom recognized that Nehru was also a critic of
Western industrialism. He corroborated the popular view of Indian nationalism that class
struggle and the horrors of industrial revolution that were so much the vogue in
Manchester, were alien to India. As Prakash argues, the reality that India eventually
landed into a modern nation-state should be ascribed to the fact that both Nehruvian and
Gandhian critiques of Western modernity were expressive in the historical context of
nationalism. This was both their strength and their weakness.145

Thus Subaltern Studies appeared, as Gyan Pandey pointed out, as a prevailing critique of
the traditional concept of nationalism and the prejudiced way of history writing.146 We
have seen in the early pages of this section how in the early narrative of the rise and
growth of Indian nationalism, the focus had been on nationalist ideology and
consciousness. All local and regional voices, all other forces and identities, all fractions
and varieties of consciousness were supposed to have been homogenized into the orbit of
nationalism. The nation appeared to be an entity that was in line with a single set of
interests. We have also discussed how the so-called Cambridge School undermined the
working of any such nationalist ideology and instead, gave all credit to the administrative
framework created by the British. Bipan Chandra, on the other hand, was of opinion that
in British India, there were two types of contradictions. First, the interests of the people
98
of India came in conflict with the interests of colonial rule. Secondly, the divergent
forces and tensions of colonial society shaped by the identities of class, caste and
community, clashed between themselves. With time, however, these secondary
contradictions were subordinated to the hegemony of the dominant nationalist ideology.
Thus, as Bipan Chandra and his colleagues put it, the nationalist movement in India
became a people’s movement.147

The Western educated political leadership in India, which always consigned a privileged
position to nationalism, was no doubt too much responsive to the ‘modern’ West. Thus,
nationalism as a response to Western imperialism was in the words of Ashis Nandy,
“shaped by what it was responding to.” As Sekhar Bandyopadhyay puts it, the “counter-
modernist critic[s] of the imperial West” like Rabindranath and Mahatma Gandhi
focused on the Indian civilization as the repository of universalism. This notion of
universalism could be taken as an alternative version and this could unite India at a social
rather than political level by accepting and creatively using what Partha Chatterjee calls
‘difference’. But nobody was eager to listen to them. Instead, the Indian nationalists
accepted the Western model of nation-state as the guiding principle of their
nationalism.148

Gyan Pandey has bitterly criticized this kind of nationalist discourse as well as the
historiography that upholds it. As he argues, let others apart, even a modern and
profoundly secular nationalist historiography has reinforced a constricted and
diminishing view of nationalism and has essentialized the Indian nation. Pandey
comments in 1992:
Even today after decades of powerful and sophisticated history writing by left-wing as well
as nationalist and other liberal scholars, the view from the “center” remains the recognized
vantage point for a meaningful reconstruction of “Indian” history, and the “official”
archive … the primary source for its construction. This historiographical practice fails, it
seems to me, to lay sufficient stress on the provisional and changeable character of the
objects of our analysis: “India” as well as “Pakistan”, “Awadh”, or “Andhra Pradesh”, the
Hindu or the Muslim “community”, the “nation”, “nationalism”, and “communalism”. By
attributing a “natural” quality to a particular unity such as “India” and adopting its
“official” archive as the primary source of historical knowledge pertaining to it, the
historian adopts the view of the established state. This has surely happened in the

99
 historiography of modern India. The inordinate emphasis placed on the (given) unity of
India and the unity of the struggle to realize “her” independence has meant that the history
of India since the early nineteenth century has tended to become the biography of the
emerging nation-state.”149

Pandey has emphasized the need of recounting the ‘fragments’ in the construction of
nationalist discourse. The ‘totalizing standpoint of a seamless nationalism’ with all its
visible unity and richness looks inappropriate. Such an approach, which finds agency in
the overriding nationalist historiography, gives privilege to the ‘general’ over the
fastidious, the larger over the smaller, and the ‘mainstream’ over the ‘marginal’. That is
why it needs to be challenged.150 Pandey holds that our drive should be on the
democratic prospect of the nation rather than on nationalism that insists on cultural
homogeneity of communities. Nation should have many identities involving region,
religion, or occupation. No nation exists naturally. No nation can come into existence
without the working out of its politics.151

It has also been pointed out that Indian nationalism had a definitive Hindu overtone.
Indeed, the history of Indian nationalism since the nineteenth century reveals the crude
fact that Hindu communalism was nothing but the counter-image of Indian nationalism.
It was like seeing one’s face on the mirror – its nature, form, construction all were
identical.152 There are numerous evidences to show that Indian nationalism took the
initiative of defending Hindu religion against foreign interference. Bengali as well as
Marathi patriotic literature extensively used Hindu imageries in defining the nationalist
ideology. Since the inception of what John McLane calls the ‘Early Congress’, leaders
like Madan Mohan Malavya attempted to construct a nationalist ideology drawing upon
the notion of a golden Hindu past. This is exactly what the Bengali intellectuals and
history-book writers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay,
Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, or Krishnachandra Roy were doing in their historical
writings since the mid-nineteenth century.153 No wonder, the Muslims felt alienated from
the mainstream of nationalism and a large chunk of them broke away – as McLane has
shown – from the Congress.154 Gyan Pandey has written a lot about this. We shall have a
glimpse on it in the next few paragraphs.

100
In the face of Hindu nationalist fervour, the Muslims were also developing a new
consciousness of their communal identity. This made them keen to defend their own
interests in opposition to the interests of the Hindus. The Arya Samaj in North India
started a gaurakshini movement to prevent cow-slaughter by the Muslims on religious
grounds such as the occasion of Bakr Id. The consequence was a number of large-scale
communal riots, which rocked northern India in the 1880s and 1890s.The eighteenth
century concept of Hindustan, which both Hindus and Muslims were eager to share, was
steadily fading under the influence of an emerging communal ‘exclusivism’ in the
nineteenth century.155 The concerted action to protect the cow as a mark of Hindu
religion and, hence, of the ‘community’, comments Pandey, actually symbolized an
attempt to define the identity and assert the rights of the ‘Hindu community’ at large in
the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Historians like Francis Robinson,
Chris Bayly, Paul Brass and John McLane have obviously seen the Cow-Protection
movement as part of the attempt to construct the larger ‘Hindu community’ in northern
India. They have rightly pointed out that this kind of movement gave the Hindus a
feeling of ‘oneness’ on the one hand, and tended to separate them from all ‘non-Hindus’
on the other.156

Pandey fully corroborates the views of modern historians explaining the phenomenon in
terms of Hindu community consciousness. Rafiuddin Ahmed, for example, argues that
the issue of cow-protection came up “not so much because the Muslims loved to
sacrifice cows as because the militant Hindus [and, one might add, the colonial regime]
made it an issue.” … “What used to be a quiet and private ritual now came to be
celebrated with public éclat as an ostentatious response to the Hindu challenge.” McLane
also points out that the cow-protection movement was a ‘species of sub-nationalism’
aiming at the ‘supremacy of Hindu custom’ and excluding Muslims from the ‘primary
community or nation’. Sumit Sarkar describes the communal riots of the 1890s as “a
poor augury … for the modern national movement which was only just getting into its
stride”.157 As Pandey himself puts it, there was certainly a strong religious element in the
appeal to the Hindus. In the monthly paper Brahman, which was published in Kanpur by
Pratap Narayan Mishra, it was pointed out that cow-protection was the supreme dharma
of the Hindu and that without the protection of gaumata the ‘Hindu nation’ and the land
of the Hindus could never prosper. 158

101
Dipesh Chakrabarty has strongly criticized the nationalist and Marxist historians for
over-emphasizing ‘the colonial context’ for explaining the mentalities of communalism.
As he writes, “The point is that the nationalist-Marxist effort to set up ‘colonialism’ as an
overarching explanatory construct for all problems of popular politics in India is a
mystifying and ideological exercise. By deriving ‘consciousness’ from a set of narrowly
defined ‘objective historical forces’, it ends up bending Marxism to serve the cause of a
liberal-bourgeois nationalism. By blaming all the ‘uncomfortable’ aspects of popular
mentality, such as ‘casteism’, ‘regionalism’, ‘communalism’, etc. mainly on colonialism,
this particular brand of Marxism operates with categories specific to nationalist thought.
It leaves unquestioned one of the most important ideological categories in recent South
Asian history – namely, the ‘nation’. In this respect such ‘Marxism’ is complicit with
liberal-bourgeois nationalism.”159

We can conclude this chapter with some general comments on the basis of what we have
observed so far. It is redundant to say that Gandhian intervention fundamentally changed
the course of the history of Indian nationalism. Gandhi made bourgeois leadership realize
that ‘an authentic national movement could only be built upon the organized support of
the whole of the peasantry’. His concept of non-violence and satyagraha, which was in
direct opposition to modern Western political notions, contained a strong critique of civil
society. There were several possibilities inherent in the Gandhian political philosophy.
But in reality, they became the ideological weapons in the hands of the nationalist elite.
The latter captured the institutional configurations of the new Indian nation-state for
setting up its hegemony over others. Thus, over time Gandhian politics of non-violence
that might have constructed a non-Western modernity, helped in the appropriation of the
subalterns within the evolving forms of the embryonic nation-state. The peasantry was
politically mobilized by Gandhian politics. Gandhi’s charisma and wide acceptability
ensured the organized support of the peasants. But this did not give them political rights.
For, unlike the Mahatma the bourgeois leadership had no wish ‘to train the masses in
self-consciousness and attainment of power’. If anything, the peasantry was supposed to
be ‘a willing participant in a struggle wholly conceived and directed by others’. The
Gandhian framework of politics mobilized the peasants in the nationalist movement, but
did not allow them to participate. Peasants became a part of a nation, but were forever
detached from the national state.160

102
Notes and References

1
David Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the
Globalisation of South Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, hereafter RSS), p. 12.
2
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Itihaser uttaradhikar’ [in Bengali], in Gautam Bhadra and Partha Chatterjee,
eds., Nimnabarger itihas (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1998), p. 121.
3
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh,
1919-1922’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and
Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, hereafter OUP), pp. 143-191.
4
Neil Rogall, London Socialist Historians Group, Newsletter, No. 4 (Autumn 1994), pp. 2-3. See
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, included
in Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Delhi: OUP, 1995), Chapter 4, pp. 76-94. Also, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New
Delhi: OUP, 2001), ‘Introduction’, pp. 3-23.
5
Ludden, RSS, p. 20.
6
Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: OUP,
2003), p. 198. See, John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal, Locality, Province and
Nation: Essays on Indian Politics 1870-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973),
pp. 1-27. Tapan Raychaudhuri used the term ‘animal politics’ in his essay ‘Indian Nationalism as
Animal Politics’, Historical Journal 22 (1979), pp. 747-763.
7
Lal, ibid., pp 198-199.
8
Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National
Congress 1880-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 193.
9
Lal, op. cit., p. 200.
10
Ranajit Guha, ‘Introduction’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995
(New Delhi: OUP, 2000, hereafter SSR), p. xviii.
11
Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Delhi:
OUP, 1998), Chapter- 1 - ‘Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony and Its
Historiography’, pp.1-99.

103
12
Ann Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and
Memory in Rajasthan (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 14-15.
13
Anil Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in India’, in Gallagher, Johnson, and Seal, Locality,
Province and Nation, op. cit., pp. 6-8.
14
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p.19.
15
Ibid., p.63.
16
Ibid., p.64.
17
Henry Dodwell, A Sketch of the History of India from 1858 to 1918 (New York: Longmans,
Green, 1925), ‘Introduction’, pp.12-13 and Chapter IX - ‘The Development of Political
Sentiment’, pp. 221-225. See Guha, op. cit., p.66.
18
Thompson spoke of this achievement of universal significance. See E. P. Thompson, Whigs
and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 265.
19
Guha, op. cit., pp. 67-68.
20
Ibid., pp. 68-70.
21
Following essays deserve mention in this context: (in Bengali) ‘Ingrajer atamka’, ‘Raja o
proja’, ‘Prasanga katha’, ‘Rajkutumba’, and ‘Ghushaghushi’; included in Rabindra rachanabali
(Calcutta, BS 1368), Volume-12.
22
Rabindra rachanabali, Volume 12, pp. 847-857.
23
Ibid., pp. 856-857. See Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 72.
24
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi:
Publications Division, 1958), Volume - 23, pp. 117-118. Cited in Guha, op. cit., p. 70.
25
Karl. Marx and Frederic Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-
1994), Volume 5, p.59. Cited in Guha, ibid., p. 73.
26
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 134-141. Also see, Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of
World-History (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2002), ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-6.
27
See Alexander Bain, James Mill: A Biography (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967),
pp. 178-180. Also see Kathryn T. Flannery, ‘The Challenge of Access: Rethinking Alexander
Bain's Reformist Pedagogy’, in Rhetoric Review, Vol. 14. No. 1. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 5-22.
28
James Mill, The History of British India (4th edition, London: J. Madden, 1840), Volume 1,
p.2.
29
Ibid.
30
Guha, Dominance etc., op. cit., p. 80.
31
Henry Dodwell, India (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1936), p. 188.
32
Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 16.

104
33
Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in India’, in Locality, Province and Nation, op. cit., p.6.
34
C. J. Baker and D. A. Washbrook, South India: Political Institutions and Political Change,
1880-1940 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975), p. 1.
35
Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’, op. cit., pp. 8 and 27.
36
Gallagher, ‘Congress in Decline: Bengal 1930 to 1939’, in Gallagher, Johnson and Seal,
Locality, Province and Nation, p. 270.
37
Gallagher, op. cit., p. 325.
38
Guha, op. cit, pp. 88-89.
39
Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, op. cit., pp. 12-14.
40
Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern
Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: OUP, 1989), p. 290. Guha
developed this later in his book Dominance without Hegemony.
41
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, op. cit., p. 90.
42
Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’, op. cit., p. 3. Also see David Washbrook, ‘Political
Change in a Stable Society: Tanjore District 1880 to 1920’, in Chris Baker and David
Washbrook, South India, op. cit., p. 28.
43
Seal, ibid.
44
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 91.
45
Ibid., p. 100.
46
While writing about the aspirations of a nascent class, Marx and Engels remarked, “each new
class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry
through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that
is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as
the only rational, universally valid one.” (Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Collected Works, op.
cit., Chapter 5, p. 60). Found in Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 101.
47
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, pp. 101- 102.
48
Ibid., p. 103.
49
Ibid.
50
Cited in Guha, Dominance etc., p. 104. See B. B. Majumdar, Militant Nationalism in India and
its Socio-Religious Background (Calcutta: General Printers, 1966), pp. 74-80; and Sumit Sarkar,
The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), pp. 63-75.
51
Rabindra rachanabali (Calcutta, BS 1368), Vol. 12, p. 830.
52
Ibid.
53
Note of the Home Department, No. 5864 of 30.9[0] 9. Cited in Guha, op.cit, p.223.
54
Guha, op. cit., p. 111.
55
‘Sadupay’, in Rabindra rachanabali, Vol. 12, op. cit., pp. 826- 833.

105
56
Ibid., pp. 828-829.
57
Halliday to Carlyle, 21 September 1905. Home Public Progs B, October. N. 114-115. Cited in
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908, op. cit., pp. 316-317.
58
Sarkar, ibid.
59
M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1958), Vol. 18, pp. 75-76.
Cited in Guha, pp. 122-123.
60
Ibid., Vol. 19, pp. 82-83, 367-368. Found in Guha, ibid.
61
Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 368.
62
Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 119.
63
David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District 1917-1934 (Delhi: OUP,
1981), pp. 144, 155-156.
64
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971), p. 57.
65
Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 41, p. 537.
66
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1972-1982), Vol. 10, p.
3. Quoted in Guha, op. cit., p. 129.
67
Ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 309, 418; found in Guha, op. cit., p. 129.
68
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, op. cit., p. 130.
69
Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 41, p. 539.
70
Guha, Dominance etc. pp. 131-132.
71
Ibid., p. 133.
72
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 60-61, cited in Guha, ibid., p. 134.
73
Guha, ibid., pp. 134-135.
74
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?
(Delhi: OUP, 1986), pp. 79-81.
75
Asia Source interview with Partha Chatterjee, conducted by Nermeen Shaikh for Asia Society,
2006, internet version. (www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/chatterjee).
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), pp. 12-16.
79
Ibid., pp. 127-128.
80
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, also included in Partha Chatterjee Omnibus), pp.
3-5.
81
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, op. cit., p. 21.

106
82
See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 7 - ‘A Different Modernity’, pp. 201-
226.
83
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, pp. 43 and 50-51. Also, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From
Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), pp.188-
191.
84
Ibid., p. 54
85
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Sankhyadarshan’ (in Bengali), in Bankim rachanasamgraha,
edited by Gopal Halder, Volume on Essays, Part 1 (Calcutta: 1973), pp. 283- 284. Also, see
Partha Chatterjee, op. cit. p. 56.
86
Chatterjee, op. cit., p. 64.
87
Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and its
Implications (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1988), pp. 62-63. Also,
Bankimchandra’s essays: ‘Bangalir Bahubol’ and ‘Bharat Kalamka’ (in Bengali), published in
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, op. cit., pp. 261-266, 294-303.
88
Chatterjee, op. cit., pp. 64-65.
89
Rajnarayan Bose, Sekal ar ekal (in Bengali), eds., Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay and
Sajanikanta Das (Calcutta, 1956, first published in 1874), pp. 49-50. See Partha Chatterjee,
Itihaser uttaradhikar (in Bengali), (Calcutta, 2000), pp.174-175.
90
Bankimchandra, ‘Anukaran’ (in Bengali), op. cit. pp. 249-250.
91
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, pp. 65-66.
92
Bankimchandra, ‘Bharat Kalamka’ (in Bengali), op. cit. p.303.
93
Guha, An Indian Historiography of India, pp. 65-66.
94
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p.110.
95
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Bhudeb-rachanasambhar, ed., Pramathanath Bishi (Calcutta, BS
1364), pp. 335-339.
96
Chatterjee, op.cit. pp. 79-81.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., pp.29-30, 80-81.
99
See Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), Chapter 1 - ‘Critique of Modern Civilization’, pp. 11-35.
100
Prakash, Another Reason, pp. 201-226.
101
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil society’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern
Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: OUP, 1984), p. 153.
102
See Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Nationalism, Modernity and Civil Society: The Subalternist Critique
and After’, Presidential Address, Modern India Section, Indian History Congress, Sixty-seventh

107
Session, 2007 (published by School of Historical Studies: Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West
Bengal), p.19.
103
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed., Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 107. Quoted in ibid.
104
Cited in Ray, op. cit. p. 20.
105
Hind Swaraj, op. cit., p. 73.
106
Ray, op. cit., pp. 20-21.
107
M. K. Gandhi, ‘Congress Ministries and Ahimsa’, Collected Works, Vol. 85, pp. 266-7. Cited
in Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, op. cit., p. 116.
108
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
109
Ibid., p. 54.
110
Prithwischandra Ray, ‘Swadeshi samaj byadhi o chikitsya’, Prabasi, Sravana, BS 1311;
Pramathanath Raychaudhuri, ‘Katha banam kaj’, Prabasi, Aswin, BS 1312; both are taken from
Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, p. 55.
111
Sarkar, ibid., p. 54.
112
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 51.
113
Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society’, op. cit., p.152.
114
Ibid., pp. 154-55.
115
Ibid., p.107.
116
M. K. Gandhi, Speech at All India Congress Committee Meeting, Wardha, 15 January 1942,
in Collected Works, Vol. 75, p. 220. Cited in Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil
Society’, p. 108.
117
Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 43, p. 41.
118
Ibid., Vol. 13, p. 524.
119
Chatterjee, Asia Source interview, op. cit.
120
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, pp. 132-3.
121
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1947,
originally published in 1946) p. 48.
122
Chatterjee, op. cit., p. 150.
123
Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi: J. Nehru Memorial Fund & OUP, 1982), pp. 128-30,
and 72-73. See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, op. cit., pp. 150-51.
124
Mahadev Desai, Day-to-day with Gandhi (Secretary’s diary), Vol. III (Varanasi, 1965), pp.
142-143. Cited in Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2’,
in Subaltern Studies III, p.3.
125
D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Vol. II (Bombay, 1952),
p. 78.Cited in Amin, ibid.

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126
Desai, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 263-66.
127
Swadesh, 13 February 1921, p. 3. Quoted in Amin, p. 19.
128
Swadesh, 27 February 1921. Cited in ibid., p. 24.
129
Amin, op. cit., p. 26, note 65.
130
Gyan Shakti, April 1921, pp. 34-35. Cited in Amin, p. 52.
131
Amin, pp. 48-49. See Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in
Revolutionary France (London, 1973), pp. 73-74.
132
Swadesh, 13 February 1921. Translated in English by Amin. See Amin, op. cit., pp. 21-22.
133
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 19 (Ahmedabad, 1966), pp. 419-20. Cited in
Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919-22’, in
Subaltern Studies I, p.152.
134
Ibid., p. 164.
135
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, pp. 150-51.
136
Nehru, Discovery of India, pp. 361-369. See Chatterjee, ibid., pp. 153-156.
137
Chatterjee, ibid., pp. 156-157.
138
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 6.
139
Burton Stein, ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered,’ Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19,
No. 3. (1985), pp. 387-413; see Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, ibid., pp. 415-480.
Both are cited in Chatterjee, ibid., p.27.
140
Chris Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge
History of India, Part. 2, Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); referred to in
Chatterjee, ibid., p. 29.
141
David Washbrook, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c.
1720-1860’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1. (1988), pp. 57-96, especially pp. 68 and 76.
Mentioned in Chatterjee, op. cit., pp. 30-31.
142
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, op. cit., pp. 31-33.
143
Ibid., p. 26.
144
Prakash, Another Reason, p. 202.
145
Ibid., pp. 202-203.
146
Inaugural Address by Gyanendra Pandey at the Sixth Subaltern Studies Conference,
Lucknow, 1999. See Hiranmoy Dhar and Roop Rekha Verma, ‘Fractured Societies, Fractured
Histories’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Commentary, May 8-14, 1999.
147
Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee etc., India’s Struggle for
Independence (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 22-30. See, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From
Plassey to Partition, op. cit., pp.184-188.

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148
Bandyopadhyay, ibid., p. 185. See Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism:
Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: OUP, 1994), pp. 3-4.
149
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India
Today’, in Guha, ed., SSR, pp. 3-4.
150
Ibid., p. 29.
151
Hiranmoy Dhar and Roop Rekha Verma, op. cit. See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim be an
Indian’, article read in the Sixth Subaltern Studies Conference; see note 146 above.
152
Partha Chatterjee, Itihaser uttaradhikar, op. cit., p. 132.
153
Bankimchandra, ‘Bibidha Prabandha’, Part 1, Bankim rachanasamgraha, op. cit.; Bhudeb
Mukhopadhyay, rachanasambhar, op. cit.; Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, Bharatbarsher itihas:
Prathama bhaga (Calcutta, 1858); Krishnachandra Roy, Bharatbarsher itihas: Ingrejdiger
adhikarkal (Calcutta, 1859). All these references in Bengali are cited in Chatterjee, ibid.
Chatterjee has written impressive commentaries on the historical writings of nineteenth century
Bengal. See ibid, pp. 131-170. Also, see Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, op. cit.,
Chapter 4 [‘The Nation and Its Pasts’].
154
John R Mclane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977), Section 3.
155
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, op. cit., pp. 217-18.
156
Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi:
OUP, second edition, 2006), pp.158-163. See, Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian
Muslims. The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860-1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974); Chris Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics. Allahabad 1880-1920
(Oxford: OUP, 1975); Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974); McLane, op. cit., pp. 275-290.
157
R. Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906. A Quest for Identity (Delhi, 1981), p. 170; John.
R. McLane, op. cit., p. 275 ; Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983),
p. 80. See Gyanendra Pandey, ibid., pp. 158-63.
158
Pandey, ibid., pp.162-63, 179.
159
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Invitation to a Dialogue’, “Discussion” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern
Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: OUP, 1985), p. 373.
160
Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society’, op. cit., pp. 193-95.

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