NATIONALISM IN INDIA

ASSIGNMENT-1
Question: - Examine various approaches to the study of Nationalism in India.
According to you which one of the approaches interprets the nationalist struggle in
India the best?

In order to first understand the various approaches to the study of Nationalism, we

must dive into the concept of nation and Nationalism. Various prominent scholars
and world leaders have provided us with their own understanding of the concept of
nation. It would be true to say that nations have been described much more than
they have been defined.
Ernest Renan, a French scholar, made the earliest attempt at describing a nation.
He defined a nation as “a human collectively brought together by will,
consciousness and collective memory”. According to Joseph Stalin, “A
nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed
based on a common language, territory, economic life and psychological
make-up manifested in a common culture.” However, both these definitions
are entirely rooted in the Western European experience and neglect the idea of
nations formed based on common language or territory such as India.
Strangely enough, a lack of consensus on the question of the nation does not entirely
extend to the question of Nationalism. Ernest Geller provides us with a universal
definition of Nationalism, ‘Nationalism is a political principle that holds that
national and political units should be congruent’. Geller’s definition of
Nationalism covers all the aspects in one stroke, such as national sentiment,
thinking, consciousness, ideology and movement.
Moving on to the question of Indian Nationalism, most historians have argued that
the Indian political nation, in a modern sense of the term, did not exist before the
establishment of British rule. Nationalist leaders and historians have argued
endlessly over whether such a country existed unconsciously inside Indian
civilization and then progressively emerged through history. These discussions
among leaders have prepared the way for diverse ways to studying Nationalism,
which will be discussed more below.
 IMPERIALIST APPROACH
The imperialist school of Nationalism first emerged in the official pronouncements of
the Lord Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, Curzon and Minto and the secretary of
the state, George Hamilton. The conservative colonial administrators and the
imperialist school historians, popularly known as the Cambridge School, deny
the existence of colonialism as an economic, social, political and cultural
structure in India.
According to their analysis, national movement is based on the denial of the basic
contradiction between the interests of the Indian people and of British
colonialism and causative role this contradiction played in the rise of national
movement. The imperialist writers were also of the view that India was becoming a
nation and believed that what is called Indian consisted of religious, castes,
communities, and interests.
According to imperialist writers, the National Movement was not a people's
movement, but rather a product of the elite groups' wants and goals, which
utilized it to promote their own limited goals or the purpose of the elite group. Thus,
the elite groups and their needs and interests, provided the origin as well as the
driving force of the idea, ideology and movement of Nationalism. They
also believed that the British embedded the seeds of modernity, nation-state and
nationhood. Thereby, leading to the emergence of national movement.
As a result, imperialist school of historians views the Indian national movement as a
cloak for power struggles among various sections of the Indian elite, as well as
between them and foreign elites, effectively denying the movement's insistence and
legitimacy as a movement of the Indian people seeking to overthrow imperialism and
establish an independent nation state.
 NATIONALIST APPROACH
Towards the end of the 19th century there emerged the beginnings of what have been
called Nationalist interpretations of Indian History and it is one of the major
approaches in Indian Historiography. In-the colonial period, this school was
represented by the political activists such as Lajpat Ray, A.C, Majumdar, R.G.
Pradhan, Pattavi Sitharamya, Surendranath Banerjee, C.F. Adrevs and
Girija Mukharjee.
Nationalist Historians understand the exploitative nature of colonialism and
the devious effect it had on Indian economy and culture. They believe that
the expansion and realization of Liberty was the catalyst for the nationalist
movement. Early Nationalist school focused primarily on the supremacy of a
nationalist ideology and a nationalist consciousness.
According to Nationalist historians the country was thought to be a homogenous
entity with a single set of interests, notwithstanding internal tensions within Indian
society, which led to its separation into two nation states, among other things. Major
focus on supremacy of ‘National Consciousness’ that is, the awareness of being a
nation and considered India as ‘A Nation in making’.
The major weakness of Nationalist writers was that they ignored or at least
underplayed the inner contradictions of Indian society both in terms of
class and caste and that there was a constant struggle between social,
ideological perspective over hegemony over the movement. Scholars of
Nationalist school take a secular position but they do not make a serious analysis for
instance condemnation of communalism without analyzing the character of
communalism. They also frequently embrace the right wing of the nationalist
movement's viewpoint and conflate it with the movement as a whole. Their
discussion of the movement's strategic and ideological elements is likewise lacking.
 CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL APPROACH
Emerging Cambridge scholars, Anil Seal and John Gallagher demolished the lies
of Nationalist school and denied the existence of colonialism as an
exploitative social, cultural and political structure. According to Cambridge
scholars, National movement was led by self-seeking leaders as they wanted to
expand their own consistency and was not a people’s movement but a product of
frustrated middle class and elite group interests and needs. However, they have been
blamed for denying the active role of masses in the movement, debunking the
national movement and offering a cynical view of history.
 MARXIST APPROACH
The orthodox Marxist school attempted to explain the nationalist movement's class
nature in terms of the colonial period's economic changes, particularly the
emergence of industrial capitalism and the establishment of a market
society in India. Its foundations were laid by R. Palme Dutt and A.R Desai. In
Marx’s view, Nationalism is an expression of bourgeois interests. According to him,
‘the bourgeois conveniently assumed that the nation consists only of
capitalists. The country was, therefore, theirs.’
Karl Marx in his Asiatic Mode of production argues that because there was no
private property in land, no class contradictions, no dialectic of change,
no class conflict. India was, in essence, a stagnant society. Therefore, even through
British colonialism did much harm it was necessary intervention because it broke the
stagnancy of the Indian past. According to Marxist scholars the uniqueness of India
was said to be Caste and, consequently, on the dominance of the idea that
Brahminism was responsible for the creation of caste.
It identified the bourgeois leadership, which directed the movement to suit their
own class interests and neglected the interests of the masses and even to some point
betrayed them. Early Marxists like RP. Dutt and Soviet historian V.I. Pavlov's
limited class perspective and economic determinism were modified in later Marxist
writings like S.N. Mukherjee, Sumit Sarkar, and Bipan Chandra. Mukherjee
emphasized the complexity of Nationalism, its many levels and meanings, the
relevance of caste and class, and the utilization of a traditional as well as a modern
language of politics as a means of expression.
The major drawbacks of the Marxist approach is that they tend to see the nationalist
movement as a structured bourgeois movement and miss its open ended and
all-class character. Even narrower approach has been witnessed among Marxist
historians who suggested that the access to financial resources determined the ability
to influence the course and direction of nationalist politics.
 SUBALTERN APPROACH
Subaltern historians initiated a new perspective on the study of Indian Nationalism,
arguing that the studies conducted in the 20th century were dominated by an
elitism that focused on either the colonial state or the indigenous elites,
the bourgeoise nationalists or the middle class. It emerged majorly as a
critique towards the two major schools of thought, Nationalist and Marxist. Major
Scholars associated with subaltern approach are Ranajit Guha, Gyanendra
Pandey, Deepesh Chakroborty and Partha Chatterjee. They stressed the
need to look at the participation of the subaltern groups which included workers,
peasantry, women, students etc. as defined by Gramsci.
According to Ranajit Guha, in the first volume of subaltern studies, there was a
"structural dichotomy" between the two domains of elite politics and that of the
subalterns, as the two segments of Indian society lived in two completely separate
and autonomous mental worlds defined by two distinct forms of consciousness,
though not hermetically sealed. The development of national consciousness in India
was the function of stimulus and response i.e., Stimulus was provided by the
British and response by the Indians.
“History from Below” became their slogan. The subaltern scholars used diverse
sources, moving away from archives and official papers to a variety of local sources,
private and popular. They also emphasized the importance of the oral tradition as
legitimate historical source material.
However, subaltern approach has moved its focus from class to community, from
material analysis to the privileging culture, mind and identity. Sumit Sarkar points
out the “decline of the subaltern in subaltern studies.” Even though the
original motive of the group might have been to provide an alternative theory of
Nationalism, there is no framework of explanation which relates itself to a central
point and to which each study can refer.
Indian Nationalism is an intensely contested discursive terrain from where it is
difficult to arrive at a dialectical middle ground or evolve an eclectic view that would
be acceptable to all. Outside of the aforementioned schools, which are more or less
clearly defined, there has been a plethora of additional publications that have
examined Indian Nationalism from a variety of ideological and historiographical
viewpoints.
According to me, Nationalist approach interprets the nationalist struggle in India in
the best possible manner as it focuses on the spirit of freedom and emphasizes on a
variety of factors for the rise of national movement such as – the generally unfriendly
attitude of the colonizers, reactionary policies, the modern education, printing press,
modern literature, and finally the partition of Bengal. The official policy of racial
discrimination in certain policies humiliated Indians further and sowed the seeds of
bitterness.
The Nationalist historians also underlined the economic factors which led to a feeling
of dissatisfaction among the masses. Peasant exploitation, high land revenue, forced
cultivation of indigo and other cash crops, wealth drain, needless use of Indian
income to maintain a huge military force to be used against Indians or to conduct
wars that did not truly affect India, and so on.
According to Nationalists, the national movement was a movement of all classes in
Indian society. They also pointed out the underlying contradiction between the
imperialist rule and the Indian people as a whole. Therefore, papering over all the
class, caste, linguistic, regional and religious contradictions which existed in Indian
society in order to portray a pan-Indian anti-imperialist front.
The majority of nationalist historians felt that the people were incapable of acting on
their own and needed to be mobilized by middle-class leaders. Lajpat Rai
commented that ‘The masses are easily led astray by governments or by classes in
league with governments. In every country, it is the educated middle class that leads
the movement for political independence or for political progress’.
Nationalist historians believe that the country's leaders were committed idealists
motivated by patriotism and concern for the country's welfare. Even though they
were from the middle classes, nationalist leaders, in this perspective, had no
personal, group, or class interests and were dedicated to the cause of the country and
the Indian people.
Many of them argued that India always possessed the potential to be forged into a
nation, and it did happen at several points in the past. Although they did not deny
the role of modern Western ideas, many of these historians argued that India had an
underlying cultural unity since the most ancient times.
Thus, to conclude I’d say that nationalist historians regarded the national movement
as a pan-Indian movement encompassing all classes and groups led by idealist and
selfless leaders and did justice in interpreting the national struggle of India.
NAME – SAMIYA MISHRA
CLASS- 1B