The illegitimacy of nationalism

Description

This essay sketches the psychological biography of the modern nation state in India in the early years of the nationalist movement. Most nationalist leaders in India, adopting uncritically the western ideology of nationalism, were then convinced that the absence of a proper nation state and proper nationalist sentiments were major lacunae in Indian society and indices of its backwardness. English education was seen as theprincipal means by which Indians would be freed of their irrationalities and be knit into a single cohesive political and cultural community. Yet, by the 1920's, some ambivalence towards the idea of a monocultural nation state and towards nationalism itself had appeared within the Indian freedom movement. And this ambivalence was often expressed by some of the most important figures in the movement, by those very persons who would beconsidered the major builders of India's national identity, some of whom had found out the cultural and moral impact of nationalism not only on its opponents but even on its champions. To some, including Tagore, the alternative was a distinctive civilizational concept of universalism embedded inthe tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse, plural society. Some sceptics began to associate nationalism with modern colonialism's record of violence, and, while they continued to view an anti-imperialist stand as being an almost sacred reponsibility, they refusedto accept the western idea of nationalism as being the inevitable universal of our times. This essay tells the story of one such dissenter, whose reservations about nationalism led him to take up a public position against it, and who built his resistance on India's cultural heritage and plural ways of life. It does so by analysing three of Tagore's novels (all of them available inEnglish translation). It also touches upon similar ambivalences in two other nationalist thinkers of India, to show that Tagore's dissent was not idiosyncratic; it was latent in others too, for it was based on a certain reading of Indian civilization and actual political processes in India, and ina particular native meaning given to the political struggle against imperialism. Chapter 1: The Ideology Nationalism versus Patriotism Tagore's 'Nationalism' Chapter 2: The Novels The Home and the World The Politics of New Violence Loss and Recovery of the Self Chapter 3: The Lives Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: Tagore's Political Double Authority and Defiance: The Artist as Autobiographer Chapter 4: Conclusion The Larger Crisis Index