1

Tagore and the conception

of critical nationalism
Sudipta Kaviraj

In the discipline of conceptual history, few concepts are so hard to tackle as the
idea of the nation. This is so because of its variations across two different axes:
different stages in history accord different collective valences to the concept; but
within each period and each group individuals inflect the term in distinctively
different ways. Some political terms like the state, despite their own indetermina-
cies, at least have some elements of material, institutional fixity. The nation, by
contrast, is just an idea – one of the most indefinable, intangible and yet emotion-
ally forceful concepts affecting political action in the modern world. Nationalism
in its two primary forms – European imperialist nationalism1 and anti-imperialist
nationalism in Europe’s colonies – were shaping the world throughout the span of
Tagore’s life; and he looked at these vast political convulsions with great atten-
tion and rare insight. His peculiarity lay in the fact that unlike most intellectuals
of his times he did not embrace the simple solution of deciding which side to
support; he decided to observe critically the strange impulses that emerged from
the diffuse nationalist sentiment, and provided a critique of both sides, not just of
imperialist Europe. Nationalist sentiment associated with religious communities
has re-emerged as a powerful force in our times as well – though not in forms that
were familiar to Tagore. Thus there is a straight connection between the ques-
tion that fascinated and troubled Tagore and the urgent political predicaments we
face today. Because of the detachment, sanity and civility of his thinking on this
question, it repays close attention in our troubled world. I am a Bengali, and for
a Bengali interested in literature, thinking about Tagore is a fraught and intense
experience – not unlike the experience of believers in thinking about God: it is
a pleasure to think about him, but it is also a humbling experience. He was the
creator of my world, at least the intellectual world inside which I live and think,
because he literally created the language through which I think, through which my
mind touches every object in my world.
The intellectual world that Tagore’s mind/art created is one of great beauty, but
one that is not always grasped, also of great intellectual complexity. It is inad-
equate to honor him simply as a great artist. Apart from a producer of great art,
undoubtedly, he was also a producer of social thought of unusual complexity and
subtlety – gifted with a strange, unordinary vision. He was able to see much about
the world of his times that others who were social thinkers of the more obvious
14 Sudipta Kaviraj
often failed to grasp. I have argued elsewhere that he was an unusually astute
analyst of the nature of modern political power; and his complex reflections on
nationalism form part of that very unusual corpus of profoundly critical reflec-
tion on the nature of the political. In this chapter I shall use material from his
essays and writings on nationalism, but supplement them with some readings of
his poetry and fiction.
There is a widespread, but to my judgement erroneous, view that accounts for
the rise of nationalism in Asian societies like Japan, China and India in a simple
diffusionist way. The prejudice that all significant things originate in Europe and
circulate to the rest of the world with a lag is so deeply entrenched that we often
accept a casual, inattentive, entirely diffusionist theory of the spread of modern
nationalism.2 Through the accumulation of several mutually reinforcing processes
of modernity – the rise of capitalist industrialism, of the modern state and its
requirement of a form of sociability that transcended the ‘unsocial sociality’3
of bourgeois economies, a new relationship emerged between rulers and their
subjects – of an unprecedented connection of intimacy and ownership between
political subjects and their state, which was known as nationalism. It was not
merely the power of capitalist economic productivity that enabled the expansion
of Western power across the world, but its coupling with this entirely new form of
collective belonging. Once other societies saw the immensity of the effects of this
power – that lay behind the dominance of modern Europe – they started emulating
this sentiment. That is simple version of this textbook story of nationalism.
Historically minded people will realize that this story is woefully inadequate
and misleading. There is no doubt that many Asian observers thought that the
strange fact that a small number of people from a distant island could navigate the
world and conquer India could not be simply explained by the power of military
technology. After all, military techniques could be easily mastered by Asian peo-
ples; what gave the Europeans an ability to mobilize a superior form of force was
a peculiar organization of emotion behind their state apparatus, and the chemistry
of an affect that produced an unprecedented figuration of collective intentionality
and collective action.4 This was the invention of the nation-state. The negative
experience of European colonization made this sentiment attractive to the elites
of colonized societies. Intelligent observers from Asia prefigured in their analysis
of European power some of the disciplinary features later examined by Foucault,
and this gave rise to an envy for forms of similar techniques for forming collective
intention and launching collective action. But it was not easy initially to introduce
this new idea, or even to linguistically capture and express it with precision and
clarity. In India, Bengal was the first regional culture in which these questions
began to be raised, simply because it was the region subjected to British rule ear-
liest, and for the longest time. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, a novelist, satirist
and political essayist, spoke first of the need for anti-colonial opposition to British
rule.5 But it was not easy to introduce this novel idea that Indians – all the diverse
communities who were subjects of the British Indian Empire – should begin to
think of themselves as a single people: a nation. When he wrote about this theme,
Bankim would often signal the awkwardness and absence of an equivalent term
 Tagore and critical nationalism 15
in Bengali by using the telling phrase – what the English call ‘the nation’. The
Bengali word that he was forced to use to capture this sense was the word jati,
which was heavily freighted with previous semantic weight. It referred to either
a bland logical class – like the class of cows, the class of tables, the class of pots;
or caste groups like Brahmins or Kayasthas or Shudras. Eventually, the term set-
tled into a polyvalent use, adding the reference to the nation parallel to its other
antecedent semantic denotations: but audiences could unerringly understand its
particular valence in a sentence by techniques of contextual reference. Go-jati,
for instance, will mean the class of cows, Vaishya-jati the Vaishya or mercantile
caste and Bharatiya jati the Indian nation. Clearly although the same term – jati –
is used, the three meanings are separate; but the only linguistic marker of this
semantic difference would be the contextual placement of the term in the syntactic
chain. Bankimchandra’s works were pioneering in two senses: they showed both
the newness and the vagueness of a pioneering idea: though Bankim passionately
wrote to persuade his compatriots that they should oppose British power/rule,
there remained a fatal ambiguity in his thinking.6 The jati that was to take on
the historic task of opposing British rule remained oddly unspecified: at times it
seemed this was the historic task of the Bengalis, at others of the Hindus or of the
Indians – which had very different implications for the character of subsequent
nationalism. Bankim was surely a passionate anti-imperialist; but strangely he had
not yet chosen his nation.
By the time Rabindranath Tagore became a young intellectual, a prolific writer
of poetry, fiction and serious political commentary, Bankim’s literary interven-
tions had made nationalism a familiar idea. His historical novels were immensely
popular, and translated widely in numerous other languages – to provide them
with vast audience that transcended the boundaries of his native Bengal. Bengalis
began viewing with intense interest the dramatic unification processes unfold-
ing in Italy and Germany, and reading Mazzini’s works in English translation.7
But this unfamiliar new sentiment, which could sweep everything before it, took
concrete form and expression through a British decision in 1905 to divide the
province of Bengal into an eastern and western part.8 Though the ostensible rea-
son was given as administrative convenience, as Bengal was an unwieldy, large
territorial unit, research has convincingly shown that their objectives were less
benign.9 A split in the province would create two administrative regions statisti-
cally dominated by two religious communities – likely to fuel discord between
their elites, and thus retard Indian demands for self-government. Certainly, this
was not the first major uprising against British rule: the 1857 rebellion started by a
section of the native soldiers of the British army which spread to much of northern
India, was a major upheaval that seriously threatened British dominion in India;
but clearly, the organization, ideology, leaders and followers of this uprising were
quite different from what we see as a modern nationalist movement. The parti-
tion of Bengal evoked a massive popular response against the British decision,
and it brought about for the first time in Indian history the peculiar convergence
of elite-intellectual and mass-popular mobilization against foreign rule. Tagore,
a relatively young intellectual, initially enthusiastically supported the growing
16 Sudipta Kaviraj
mass movement. But Tagore practiced a peculiar and rare form of intellectual par-
ticipation – taking part in action and observing the consequences of one’s actions
at the same time.10 In classical Indian philosophy, the mind is sometimes likened
to two birds – one of which acts, and the other observes the other acting; this, by
implication, is the nature of truly intelligent action, a mark, as the Gita would say,
of detachment in the process of acting itself
As the Swadeshi movement ended after three years of deep political convul-
sions, with some success, two divergent views of political action emerged which
derived utterly different conclusions from a retrospective analysis of what had
happened. For ordinary political activists and intellectuals, the Swadeshi move-
ment showed, first of all, that the power of the British colonial state was not
entirely unanswerable. A decision of the British government, even at the high-
est point of imperialism, could be thwarted by a ‘movement’ – an entirely new
form of political action. Western educated intellectuals knew about the powers
of such movements from the history of modern Europe; but this kind of collec-
tive action was unprecedented in Indian colonial history. Political intellectuals
began thinking about what could be the ways in which such mass mobilizations
could be better organized and directed towards larger goals – e.g., extracting more
self-governing powers, or eventually, even independence from British rule. After
Swadeshi, the central question of Indian political thought changed: from How did
India become colonized? to How can India become independent?
Rabindranath’s individual reflections took a wholly different and distinctive
direction. Tagore closely examined the stages through which the movement had
evolved, and what happened inside every stage, and his analytical conclusions
were far more complex. Like many other young intellectuals, he was impatient
with the strange contentment of the leaders of the moderate, constitutionalist
agitation of the early Indian National Congress (INC), chafed at the restraints
such leaders accepted; and sought a more rebellious infusion of popular participa-
tion in the defiance against British rule. When the Swadeshi movement gathered
strength, he exultantly supported its cause. But, like all popular movements, as it
expanded in its influence and support, it also became more complex, developing
many different strands of mobilization and political action. Two types of develop-
ment caused him concern. The first was an intensification of activist enthusiasm
into terrorist action against individual British officials. The outbreak of terrorism
profoundly troubled Tagore’s consciousness because of its complex features – its
immense heroic attractiveness to youth, its colossal waste of idealistic lives, and
its futility as a political technique. As the movement intensified, Tagore observed
with unease, mobilizers became more ferocious and desperate to increase the
force of popular power. Hindu activists of the Swadeshi movement began to use
appeals of Hindu religion, eliciting responses of resistance from Muslim groups
opposed to the movement. A movement directed at a political objective became
troubled with intense mobilization of two religious communities. For Tagore, this
was a strangely frustrating outcome of a popular mobilization which had brought
out deep democratic energies of politics, widened participation, but also mobi-
lized the darkest forces of atavism. Associated with this were deeper causes of
 Tagore and critical nationalism 17
concern. In mobilizing popular numbers, politicians not merely showed uncon-
cern for religious divisions, and felt happy if they could mobilize large groups of
people despite the cost of antagonizing an equally large number – creating a large
mobilized popular force, but at the same time threatening to rip apart the fabric of
everyday peaceability and neighborliness between Hindus and Muslims. It was a
travesty of the dream of a mobilized people: the dream, in parts, had turned into
a nightmare.
From the troubled outward field of political life, after the apparent success of
the Swadeshi agitation, Tagore retreated into the internal field of his artistic imagi-
nation, where his thought was untrammeled by constraints of external reality, and
he could depict without hindrance the logic of these different, often contradictory
strands of dark populist politics – which, for Tagore, would either make freedom
impossible, or it might bring into reality an entirely travestied version of inde-
pendence. He was not a stranger to the conflicts of political debate – but was an
unenthusiastic controversialist.11 In directly political debates, he appears an unen-
thusiastic combatant, restrained continually by demands of extreme civility. But
inside the world of his artistic fiction, within an interior world under his authorial
sovereignty, he was free to create characters and situations that would reveal the
logic of disaster which outer social reality did not show with remorseless clarity.
His novels were his revenge on reality in that sense.

Fictional reflections
Three of Tagore’s novels are concerned with painting artistic pictures of both
personal and collective forms of nationalist politics: but their intellectual force
consists in the fact that unlike political theory writings, they capture processes
at three levels. Fiction offered a profound analysis of the transformation of indi-
vidual subjectivities as they engage in the business of transforming themselves
in transforming their society. Doing politics is a transformative activity in two
ways: it seeks to and often succeeds in transforming society. Acting politically
also often transforms the acting subject – partly because self-transformation, or
self-fashioning, is a purpose of those acts. Politics is not an activity that occurs
only at the level of larger social processes: its effects reach deep into the inner
recesses of the individual’s mind, sensibility and his use of reason. It is only one
particular kind of personality that can succeed in the special field of activity we
call politics. That is a personality that subjects to instrumental political calcu-
lation the consideration of effects in the lives of real people, a personality that
sacrifices, at the level of personal rationality, the wertrational to the zweckra-
tional to use Weber’s dichotomy, or ends to means. Instrumental calculation has
significant cumulative effects on the life of the political group. Fictional writers
often portray a tendency towards natural degeneration in the character of political
groups – like small secretive terrorist cells and the large mass movements – as
they evolve towards greater power and maturity. Through systematic substitu-
tion of the instrumental over the morally rational, they become massive collective
instruments of self-aggrandizement of large groups which learn to maneuver and
18 Sudipta Kaviraj
to corner, neutralize and humiliate other large social groups – who are obliged
to enter into spiraling exchanges of hostility. Although idealistic individuals join
movements through their love of ideals, they are forced into submission to an
internal discipline enforced by leaders. Eventually they learn to curb their sub-
jectivity and judgement for the ‘greater cause’ the movement represents. Starting
as forces of liberation, they often degenerate into producing their own pockets
of submission. Finally, in their large historical consequence, such movements
are likely to damage their societies by polarizing them through the contestation
of more lethally organized power than was the condition before. Observing the
Swadeshi movement at close proximity, Tagore produced a very interesting diag-
nosis of modern politics. This ‘picture’ in fiction was entirely distinct from most
of his associates and collaborators who participated in enacting or supporting the
agitation. The lesson they took away from the movement was that in future such
movements were to be organized on a more expanded scale to be more effective
and to pose a serious threat to the power to the colonial state. Tagore went away
with a more complex and pessimistic lesson: that such large-scale enterprises of
political mobilization – creating a new form of power out of the helpless submis-
sion of the atomized masses of ordinary people – were fraught with great dangers
and required vigilance and critical monitoring.
Critical reflections of ‘movement politics’ were expressed in Tagore’s writings
in two forms – in a series of critical essays, a favorite form of political comment
of Indian nationalists and a number of novels exploring human experience and
political subjectivities in times of great mobilization. In my view, therefore, to
read Tagore’s mind on modern politics, we must see his analytic intention dis-
tributed between his political writings about the world of political facts and his
imaginative work on the fictive world of real but unrealized possibilities. Two of
his novels explore the logic of these deformations of modern politics – Home and
the World (Ghare Baire), and Four Chapters (Char Adhyay).12
In the first, which has been turned into a film by the great film auteur Satya-
jit Ray, Tagore prepares a narrative exploration of an individual political career.
Sandip, its main protagonist, begins his political career in genuinely intense ide-
alistic attachment to his nation. Gradually, by exaggerating the importance of this
cause over all other ideals and values, he sets in motion two types of manipula-
tive actions – one by exploiting individual relationships and developing an illicit
attachment to the wife of his closest friend, subordinating her to his desire; and
secondly, he cynically incites a communal religious frenzy in the locality. But
when the fire he lights gets out of control and the fight for the motherland degen-
erates into a war between Hindus and Muslims, the wily politician slinks away
with the excuse that, as a leader, he has the supreme obligation to preserve his own
life over those of others, so that he can start his noble and unending fight for his
country’s liberty at some other more propitious time. We get a sense that he will
inevitably ‘succeed’: he will reappear in the same role in some other context, he
will affect the lives of others close to himself, and lead other communities which
had lived as neighbors for centuries into a bonfire of the peace.13 The ideal of the
nation will burn to ashes in the fire of communal strife. Sandip’s degeneration is
 Tagore and critical nationalism 19
not a lapse, but a degradation. His act is not an uncharacteristic isolated act of a
still idealistic youth. His personality has been changed by politics: it is impossible
to reach that earlier self; because that no longer exists.
A second novel, Char Adhyay, depicts the life of another youth collapsing into
utterly meaningless political sacrifice. His idealism leads the hero, Atin, into a
feeling of guilt about his comfortable upper-class life, and draws him towards
a group of terrorists vowed to liberate the nation by redemptive acts of violence
against the British. Slowly they entice him into acts of violence which he increas-
ingly finds repugnant, and his descent into this vortex of violence inevitably
draws with him his woman friend who is an object of lust to other revolutionaries
without scruples. Once he is drawn into this closed politics of terror, all his paths
to ordinary life are cut off; his life descends into an inescapable route of violence
which he finds meaningless and destructive. Eventually, Tagore characteristically
ends the narrative by suggestion rather than clear diegetic finality, in which the
lives of these two promising young people are destroyed without much benefit to
the motherland. They end in pointless, utterly wasted sacrifice
Placing these two narratives together, we can get a sense of Tagore’s deepening
concern about the temptations in the path of political violence for justice, in some
ways quite similar to Gandhi’s.14 In a series of reflections Tagore produced a com-
pelling historical sociology on the question of social power. He saw modernity as
a combination of historical forces which irreversibly altered the nature of power;
placing political power at the center and at the top of a society in a historically
unprecedented fashion.15 Through endogenous modernity, as in Europe or Japan,
or colonial intrusion of modern politics as in colonies like India, politics became
the dominant force in modern society: this was entirely unlike pre-modern social
structures. But this politics is all powerful, it does not allow people to ignore it,
it does not allow any place to hide from its tentacles. Modern people must make
political power a principal object of their historical thinking. I shall argue at the
end that despite its perceptiveness, there was also a strangely unsatisfactory qual-
ity to Tagore’s thinking about modern power, and he arrived at conclusions that
were finally theoretically antipolitical, and remained caught in a paradox: arguing
intellectually that politics could not be marginalized in the social life of mod-
ern societies, and yet exhorting people to take a stance that disallowed politics
the power to dominate all forms of social life.16 Although this eventual position
maneuvered him into a rather strange location in political theory, he arrived at that
conclusion through some rarely insightful reflections on the effects of politics on
modern life.
I would like to argue that there are three major innovations in Tagore’s politi-
cal thought, and I shall speak about each of these in turn before concluding with
what I think is the real value of Tagore’s thinking about political modernity. The
first element of great value is Tagore’s exploration of the relation between words
and the world: his growing perception that new practical ideas were making an
entry into Indian social life, altering and breaking the coherence of its categorial
language. Second, he slowly developed an unusual and highly interesting theory
of power and resistance in modern societies. Finally, he fashioned by consistent
20 Sudipta Kaviraj
critical reflection on the idea of the nation a strangely sophisticated conception of
a critical nationalism – a strange nationalism critical of itself.
Tagore was particularly perceptive in grasping that the two new concepts that
invaded the political-moral imaginary17 of modern India were the ideas of the
‘nation’ and the ‘state’ – both of which were historically entirely new to the pre-
existing intellectual vocabularies of the subcontinent. Somewhat like Gandhi,
Tagore thought that the main problem with colonialism was not subjection in sov-
ereignty, but a subjection to the modern social imaginary which made sovereignty
the center of all political attention and collective activity. Introduction of these
practical concepts carried the promise – to unrepentant modernists, and a threat
to thinkers like him and Gandhi – of re-structuring the most fundamental rela-
tions in society in a way that imitated transformations in modern Europe. Colo-
nialism, by denying sovereignty to the indigenous society, made people focus on
it perversely, and Indian society was gradually becoming habituated to the idea
that all significant initiatives affecting society must come from the power of the
state – rajashakti, rather than atmashakti, associative powers of the society itself.
For Tagore, pre-modern Indian society was not state-centric; and the affliction of
colonialism was two-fold. The more obvious problem with colonialism was that
political sovereignty passed into the hands of alien rulers. But nationalists who
saw that as the exclusive problem did not have a deep enough vision of what was
really wrong with colonization. In an underlying sense, it was the idea of modern
sovereignty itself that Tagore saw as the problem: imposition of a regime of the
modern sovereign state which surrendered all other sources of authority in social
life to its comprehensive domination. It would be a tragedy, Tagore thought, if this
underlying regime became permanent, even though Indians came to acquire this
sovereign power. Interestingly, on this particular point, his diagnosis was exactly
parallel to Gandhi’s in Hind Swaraj: dominance by an Indian elite which contin-
ued with the regime of modernity would simply be colonization by other means, a
permanent historic defeat of the Indian civilization. Tagore’s opposition to moder-
nity was not as comprehensive as Gandhi’s: he did not view the entire civilization
of Western modernity as a degrading force for the world, only some of its con-
stituents. But their similarity lay in the fact that both thought similarly regarding
the logic of the modern state, and techniques of modern power. Tagore argued
passionately that India had never known a concept like the nation whose feeling
of community was based on peoples’ common link to the political power of the
modern state. And, as becomes apparent through the narrative developments of
his novel, Gora, his major concern was about the homogeneity demanded and
celebrated by the ideal of the European nation-state. His novel was meant as a
critique of this ideal that was gaining increasing popularity in Indian nationalist
opinion. The narrative artfully suggested that the only adequate definition of an
Indian should be one that could include in its wide embrace the abandoned son
of an Irish soldier of the British army raised by Bengali Hindu mother.18A subtler
stratum of the argument should not be missed. Tagore’s concern was that those
who got easily persuaded to this fundamental transformation did not even realize
 Tagore and critical nationalism 21
that they were converted to an entirely new optics about the social world, because
much of this change occurred at a level of thought that was pre-argumentative.
Intellectuals are always self-conscious about putting together arguments form-
ing strings of connection between individual ideas. No intellectual can develop
an argument about a significant subject unselfconsciously. But the substitution
in this case was not happening through an explicit argument persuading Indians
to change their minds about the nature of their society. It was happening through
a silent substitution of semantics – shift of the term ‘state’ from one meaning to
another, and a sense of the social community from one meaning to the European
meaning of the word ‘nation’. European colonization of the Indian mind, espe-
cially of its intellectuals, habituated them to having no other community except
the ‘nation’ – which he thought was untenable in India for two reasons. First, it
was not a normal outcome of the history of sociality in Indian culture; and second,
it was an ideal of unity which always had a seed of profound exclusion at its heart.
By taking these two English-European concepts of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ for granted,
as natural, Indians were assenting to the greatest historical transformation of their
social world. That was why it was important to explore the meanings of the two
concepts and their implications.19

States and oppositional movements

To state his new idea about the untenability of the nation in the European sense,
Tagore needed a framing argument about the nature of the modern state. This
was, to my judgement, entirely unprecedented in Indian reflection20 and captured
a profound truth about the modern world. His argument consists of two parts, the
first of which is rather similar to one found in Tocqueville.21 Like Tocqueville,
Tagore starts from the premise that the modern state is unlike states and regimes
of power that had existed in earlier times. In many of his literary essays, he uses
effective tropes like the uproar of a storm to refer to the power of rulers who sat
on top of societies, but did not involve themselves in their everyday lives, making
for a stark distinction between political and social life. What happened on the top
layers of political power was cataclysmic, but did not involve the settled layers
of everyday life – which continued undisturbed through such upheaval: ‘even
in a day of a great storm, the storm is not the most significant truth: the life that
occurs wordlessly in the everyday is the greater truth of this life.’22 Emergence of
the modern state irreversibly altered this relation – creating a new type of state
which had not merely the practical power to dominate all fields of social life, but
also carried the ethical sanction for acting on behalf of society as a whole – which
premodern political elites never could. This utterly altered the order and struc-
ture of social life, placing the state at the center of everything. Pre-modern states
could face two kinds of responses – of either being ignored or being successfully
opposed by cliques of powerful dissident aristocracy. The disciplinary power of
the modern state could hardly be restrained by such devices. Social conditions
of modernity destroyed the aristocracy – which constituted competitive centers
22 Sudipta Kaviraj
of political and military force. Atomized ordinary citizens simply had no hope of
successful opposition to the state. To this point Tagore’s diagnosis of the modern
political predicament runs mainly parallel to Tocqueville’s. Given these condi-
tions, Tocqueville believed, the only serious opposition to the power of the state
could be a vibrant ‘civil society’, a lively associational life which did not cede
all social initiative to the state. Perception of the modern state’s unanswerable
power created a deep anxiety – widely shared among political theorists – about its
potential misuse. What if the state holding such unprecedented power happened
to be unjust or oppressive? One answer to that could be found in constitutionalism
and checks and balances – distribution of the state’s power among its constituent
branches with such institutional ingenuity that one agency restrained the other.23
Tagore faced a different historical reality from the European thinkers. The colonial
state was by nature alien to the people it governed, and therefore there was a con-
stitutive injustice in its nature. How could a crowd of ordinary people, unarmed,
unendowed with the power of conventional aristocracy, contest and challenge the
state’s unanswerable force in a colonial context? European history in recent times
showed that the only force which could successfully oppose the state were large
popular movements. Tagore thought it was inevitable that in colonial situations
popular power would be mobilized through large popular movements. This is why
the example of the Swadeshi movement was not contingent, but paradigmatic.
The historical field of modern politics opened up between two grand contestants,
two collective protagonists of political force: states and popular movements. Not
surprisingly the political history of modernity was primarily a story of states and
their conflicts with mass popular movements. But this optic about modern politi-
cal life also leads to a fatal/decisive conclusion about present Indian political life.
The colonial state was a typical state of injustice which had to be opposed politi-
cally and contested ethically. If in modern times the unanswerable power of the
state could only be challenged by the counter-power of a disciplinary political
movement – which generated its own power through very similar mechanisms of
symmetric collective action of mass-popular collective actors – then it followed
that the only prospect of an end to foreign domination was through a nationalist
popular movement. But this reading of history contained dismal forebodings of
enslavement of free human life to another gigantic incarceration. Prophetically,
in his plays often there is a conjunction of political power and the overwhelming
forces of technology. Colossal technological mechanisms are always, symboli-
cally, in the hands of the king of the dark chamber.24
Although Tagore did not present it as a political program, his solution lay in
the patient fashioning of a new theory of collective belonging – for which even
he could not find a distinctive name. He developed this idea through descriptive
elaboration of the precise nature of this sentiment of collective identity. We face
a deep linguistic problem here – because human beings’ language, as Mill said, is
always poorer than its ideas. As we are habituated to using the term ‘nationalism’
to refer to such collective sentiments of belonging, or community, people gener-
ally use the word ‘nationalism’ to refer to it. In one sense, that description is apt;
in another entirely inappropriate; and without understanding this distinction, we
 Tagore and critical nationalism 23
cannot grasp Tagore’s utterly innovative thinking about the ‘problem’ of nation-
alism. It is generally recognized that the phenomenon termed nationalism has
some internal variation: the most well-known distinction is the one between civic
and ethnic nationalism – a differentiation suggested by the irrefutable difference
between French and German forms. However, even this distinction does not really
capture the finer point that concerned Tagore, and we cannot express his distinc-
tions with precision and accuracy by borrowing a terminology fashioned to make
sense of European history. It is best to try to illustrate this point by closely reading
some of Tagore’s celebrated ‘patriotic’ poems.25

Patriotism and nationalism

Ashis Nandy, one of India’s distinguished political theorists, has made a cryptic
claim in his work The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (1994) that it is a mistake
to characterize the two great figures of Indian freedom – Tagore and Gandhi –
as nationalists; they were not nationalists, but patriots. I think this represents
a very significant insight, but I want to look into the logic of this argument
more closely. Nandy explains that he views nationalism as a feeling of collec-
tive belonging that is centred on a state that not merely protects the people, but
also gives the people their enveloping sense of identity. He is entirely right in
stating that if nationalism is defined in this state-centric fashion, Gandhi and
Tagore are certainly not ‘nationalists’. The trouble with this line of reasoning
is that it accepts without critical demur an entirely Eurocentric conception of
nationalism; because although there is a profound difference between civic and
ethnic forms of nationalism, they are both undoubtedly centred on the idea that
in modern times human beings preemptively base their primary identification
with reference to the state. By contrast, if Tagore and Gandhi harbored a sense
of nationalism, it sought the foundation of the nation not on the state, but else-
where. So we have to engage in a double exercise – of analyzing their actual
modes of thinking, and of theorizing this form of thinking in the context of
academic discussions on nationalism.
Tagore’s nationalist poems were written in the context of an emerging liter-
ary tradition in Bengali. An entirely innovative form of literary thinking about
a nation imagined as Mother had emerged in the preceding decades through the
literary works of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, whose novel, Anandamath
inaugurated this literary form. The novel also contained the first poetic composi-
tion which could be called patriotic, ‘bande mataram’ – an inspired, but utterly
exceptional digression into poetry by a writer who was a great master of prose
fiction. Probably this indicated that there was a deep internal connection between
sentiment and poetry: affect is conveyed much more expressively in the language
of poetry rather than the unmusical language of prose. But Bankimchandra’s ini-
tial creation – which he did not follow up at all – spawned an immense literary
genre of patriotic poetry and music. Fairly quickly, this genre went in the direction
of nationalist sentiment everywhere – towards an unrestrained, excessive adora-
tion of the motherland as the best in the world.26 Dwijendralal Roy, a talented
24 Sudipta Kaviraj
contemporary poet and musician, composed one of the most famous instances of
this genre of enthusiasm and excess:

In this earth – full of the bounties of wealth, food and flowers –

There is one land that is the finest of all
It is made of the stuff of dreams, and bounded by memories
You will find such a country nowhere else
She is the queen of all nations, my motherland.

Enthusiasm tends to be infectious and uncontrollable; and Roy’s poem continues

its cascading descriptions towards sentimental intensity and excess: ‘Where do
you get such mighty mountains and rivers?’ but more interestingly, ‘where will
one get such affection from brothers and mothers?’ The invocation of the moth-
erland soon bursts all bonds of restraint, and the world becomes putatively a vast
scene of contending, warring nations – all vying for unequalled glory. This tradi-
tion of nationalist self-adoration becomes bolder and more extensive, spreading
from the creation of literary word icons to visual ones when the specular elements
of iconicity are increasingly drawn from the repertoire of Hindu mythology and
iconic devotion – the Mother is viewed as a goddess. She is depicted often with
many arms in an iconic suggestion of infinite power, riding the lion, at times hold-
ing not bounties in her many arms but weapons, eventually combining contradic-
tory features – beautiful and protective to her children, fearsome to ‘others’.27

Dissenting nationalism in Tagore

As I have written extensively about these themes in my recent book,28 I shall focus
on aspects not covered in those previous readings. Ostensibly, it might appear that
Tagore too wrote some poems that were similar to Roy’s or Bankim’s songs – for
instance, numerous celebrated patriotic poems about Bengal, one of which was
turned into the national anthem of independent Bangladesh.29 But this corpus also
contains several distinctive compositions which show subtle redactions and inver-
sions of these raging nationalist sentiments. One song acknowledges a feeling of
blessedness in being born in this country, and being blessed in its feeling of love.30
But in pointed reference to the ‘queen of all lands’ – a tropic figure invoked by
adorers of both Mother India and Britannia – it says, ‘I do not know if you have
riches worthy of a queen, but I know that my soul finds peace when I rest in your
shade’. Both Roy’s poem and Tagore’s – sung endlessly in modern Bengal – are
expressions of patriotic love of one’s country conceived as mother; but there is a
stark contrast in the structure of feeling that the two poems express. In the first the
dominant sentiment is of exultation expressed in a language of majesty, competi-
tiveness and conquest – almost literally drawn from poetry that celebrated Euro-
pean figures of Britannia, or France or Germania. The second poem expresses a
sentiment of contentment, peace and intimacy – the calm that descends on the
soul in the presence and nearness of the familiar. Inhabitance of the land is in one
case exultant, because that nature, that earth is incomparable; in the other calm
 Tagore and critical nationalism 25
and cooling because it is the world that is nearest and most familiar. That world
enchants us not because it is the best, but because it is our own. It is true that both
poems seek to express a form of devotion, but devotion of very different nature,
because the devotion is directed at quite different deities.31 The spirit in one song
is of conquest, in the other of contentment.
The strangeness of the affect of Tagore’s nationalism is expressed most force-
fully in two other poems which are celebrated as patriotic songs, but which, on
closer inspection, reveal very unusual features. The first poem – he more durbhaga
desh – begins with an address to “My unfortunate land” in a tone of sadness that is
hardly ever found in this genre of poetic invocation.32 The whole poem is a litany
of sadness at the wrongs that lie at the heart of India’s past and present. Its primary
theme is expressed in the initial lines: ‘those you have wronged/humiliated, you
have to be equal in humiliation with them; because those you pushed down would
drag you down with them, those who have left behind are dragging you from the
back’; on the day of the creator’s purifying wrath, at the door of a looming famine,
this ‘nation’ will have to learn the lesson of a putative equal dignity that nation-
hood confers on every single member of its community.33 A second poem from the
Gitanjali celebrates India as a place of pilgrimage where all streams of humanity
have arrived to find a common home.34 The poem repeats the urgings found in the
previous one about restitution of honor and love to those dishonored by India’s
history; but it stresses the openness of India’s identity. Those who came down ‘the
stream of wars’ have become part of its soul; and even the West, which brings new
gifts in a new age, must find a place in its heart.35 Tagore’s famous novel, Gora,
pushes the same kind of argument by narrative arrangement. It not merely states
the equal belongingness of all India’s traditional peoples – Hindus, Muslims and
Christians – but the entire narrative operation centers around a character who is
the abandoned son of an Irish soldier during the ‘mutiny’ of 1857 who mistook
himself for long as a Hindu Brahmin. At the climactic point of the story, when
he has to face the burden of his identity, the novel urges an adoption of a form of
belonging – a definition of Indianness in which this complete ‘outsider’ can be
included with complete acceptance – as, interestingly, as it turns out, his illiter-
ate Hindu mother had accepted him all his life. Others had given him acceptance
under a mistaken identity; only his mother, who prevailed on his reluctant father
to pick up the infant, had given him an acceptance as himself, and really made him
her son. He was a man without a father, only a mother – only a mother could give
people shelter in her calming shadow. That is the shadow that Tagore believes
the nature of Bengal provided her children. What is shown subtly in Gora at the
level of personal destiny outlines a notion of care and motherhood that we can see
transferred to the figure of the iconic mother – who is a figure not of cosmic strife,
but of a cosmic tranquillity.

Deferral of celebration: the nation in past and future

I want to finish with reading another layer of poetic operation in these two
poems. All patriotic poems are usually celebrations of a collective self; obviously
26 Sudipta Kaviraj
nationalism is a highly political emotion, and it matters deeply who are included in
the celebration of the collective entity. For Hindu nationalists like V. D. Savarkar
and his followers, who were to strive to impose a Hindu construction on India’s
anti-colonial nationalism, the collective self is composed only of those for whom
India is both the fatherland (pitrbhumi) and the holy land (punyabhumi), by impli-
cation clearly excluding Muslims and Christians. By contrast, Gandhi’s collective
self was generous and pluralist, embracing in its idea of the nation all who lived
in India – whom history had made neighbors and sharers of this world. We are
used to such differences in the inclusive and exclusivist definitions of the collec-
tive self. In these two poems Tagore makes a more unusual and complex move.
Of course, Tagore sided with a definition of the self that worshipped the terri-
tory – literally, the land – which meant that its inhabitants shared the bounties and
hardships of its nature, its common material culture and were linked to it by the
relation of care that the mother had for her children. In that sense, Tagore’s nation
was the same as Gandhi’s. But the actual presentation of the idea is quite different,
partly because it unfolds on the terrain of art. What is truly remarkable in these
poems is a crucial deferral of the celebratory moment for even this inclusive, plu-
ral collective self. Take the first sentence of the first poem:

He mor durbhaga desh jader korecho apaman

Apamane hote habe tahader sabar saman

‘O my unfortunate land, those whom you have insulted: you have to become
equal to them in humiliation’. The verbs used contain a remarkable signal: the
insult, indignity and injury to parts of her own ‘people’ happened in the past
and continue in the present – korecho in Bengali grammar connotes a bland
generic past ‘what you have done’ that can arch over past and present time. In
the second phrase, ‘hate habe’ – ‘you have to be’, ‘to become’ – is in the future
tense – setting up a deep temporal and practical rupture across time. The time
of the ‘nation’ is marked, tainted by its humiliation of its own members; and
Tagore’s tone shows that in this present state this collectivity, if you call it the
nation, does not deserve any honor. Its celebration is conditional on its realizing
what is implicit in its history but still unachieved, in its promise of fusion and
internal equality. Celebration of the nation is inappropriate in the present: it can
only occur in a perfect, deferred future. The content of the nationalist emotion is
startlingly transposed. Feeling for the nation does not mean exultation in its past
glory or its incomparable present majesty; it is a grieving over its imperfection.
By this move, Tagore does something interesting to the idea of the nation, or
Indian collective identity. It is turned into a moral imaginary,36 an ideal of human
belonging which no state can historically realize in full, and which, therefore,
can be used strategically as a ground from which actual states and their always
imperfect realization of the people-nation can be criticized. Instead of becoming
a principle of exclusion, or an idea that serves to endorse the acts of the state, this
idea of the ideal nation, the ideal sociability of its constituent peoples, becomes
a principle of criticism.
 Tagore and critical nationalism 27
In trying to think through Ashis Nandy’s interesting paradox – that two of the
greatest figures of Indian nationalism are not really nationalists – we are forced
to open up a distinction between two notions of nationalism. The first meaning
of nationalism is simply an intense sentiment of anti-colonialism: the idea that
rule of one people by another is unjust, and must be ended. The second mean-
ing of nationalism is a sense of cohesion among a group of members of a state
that they are its ‘nation’, the people to whom the state belongs, who ‘own’ the
state; which immediately produces the implication that those who cannot crowd
into that definition are its internal others, marooned inside its borders but outside
its collective self-definition. Tagore was certainly a nationalist in the first sense,
and certainly not in the second. But more significantly, from the point of view
of political theory, his reflections around the idea of the modern nation – in both
political writings and artistic reflection – suggest a larger question: whether the
idea of a nation-state in the European model is a final destiny of all mankind, the
only viable political form of collective belonging; or should the political imagina-
tion of humanity set itself the task of thinking of some fundamentally different
ways of organizing ordinary people’s relation to political power?

Tagore’s political critique of nationalism

Primarily, Tagore was not a political thinker, but an artist. Naturally, his deepest
and most profoundly expressive thoughts regarding nationalism can be found in
his artistic production – in poems, songs, music and fiction. But he was a deeply
engaged inhabitant of his times. Detachment did not mean leaving the world itself
without comment. He wrote a substantial amount in direct political commentary
on the question of nationalism and modernity; and it is these prose essays which
allow us to inspect the larger argumentative frame concerning modernity within
which he set his reflections on nationalism. Like many other observers of history,
Tagore saw modernity as a vast, contradictory assemblage of ideals and practices.
But contradictoriness is a condition that can be interpreted in different ways. Con-
tradiction could mean the simultaneous existence of two conflicting sides none
of which can be shaken off. It could also indicate, in a quasi-Buddhist way, to
be constructed out of principles which are affirmative in its restrained form, but
destructive when it is pushed to extremes. Tagore saw some of the principles of
Western modern civilization as valuable: ‘higher obligations of public good above
those of family and clan’, the ‘sacredness of law’, ‘justice to all men of all posi-
tions of life’, ‘above all . . . the banner of liberty . . . liberty of conscience, liberty of
thought and action, liberty in the ideals of art and literature’. The central problem
with this civilization, Tagore thought, was that it moved the political – the power
of the state as a collective agency of the people – to the centre of everything,
eclipsing all other fields of social activity. Tagore called this evil ‘the nation’ and
attachment to it the sentiment of nationalism. ‘The political civilization which has
sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some
prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness’.37 To him, its faults are clear: it strives
to increase its power to make it unanswerable; it is naturally jealous of other
28 Sudipta Kaviraj
nations, and tries ‘to thwart all symptoms of greatness out of its own boundaries’;
and consequently, it creates a world of competition and fear amongst all nations. It
also does not allow internal diversity of races – by which he meant ethnicities. By
developing military technology it forces the creativity of science to serve the ends
of state power. It was dependent upon an economic system that created material
wealth – which used technology in a predatory way to destroy the earth, and its
natural capacity for renewal. Criticisms can be advanced against some of Tagore’s
arguments. He seems not to see that the ideals he admires in Western modernity
are also political, and stem from the primacy of the political in the new civiliza-
tion. He does not make a distinction between the nation – the intangible idea of
a common people – and the state, which is a tangible, insensate machine, though
his metaphor of a gigantic octopus seems to point to the state and its technologies
of power which subordinate other peoples, but indirectly also its own. Yet, this
lack of distinction between the nation and its state also has a forceful appositeness
at his historical moment. And it is generally acknowledged today that there was
an immense truth in his argument, alongside Gandhi’s, that answering European
power with a nationalist power in its mirror image was fraught with great danger.
The answer to the dangers that European nationalism had created in the modern
world was not to generalize that form of political union into a device of collec-
tive agency, but to develop a political theory on the basis of what he called, with
some awkwardness, the ‘no-nation’: i.e., the opposite principles. I believe that
this awkward locution contains an idea of immense and imminent promise for
political theory.38 In India politicians favoring pluralist nationalism – like Gandhi,
Nehru and Ambedkar – produced through their practice a constitution that elabo-
rated some of the implications of this alternative principle; but they neglected
the philosophical elaboration of its central ideal. Hindu and Muslim nationalists
directly opposed and derided it in favor of a simple adoration of European style
ideas of nationhood. Radical theorists, in search of a more equal union, relent-
lessly criticized it as ambiguous, unpractical and sentimental. The recent rise of
the nationalism of the European variety, which Tagore dreaded, not only in India,
but across Europe and the United States, reveals the philosophical requirement to
think deeply through the implicit irenic promise of the concept of the ‘no-nation’.
Examined closely, the history of the European state that Tagore had taken for
granted from the lyrical narratives of European modernity can be faulted easily.
He repeated the idea that European states did not have to contend with the diver-
sity of peoples that an Indian nationalism had to face; yet, this was clearly wrong.
The British, as Colley39 demonstrates, had to be formed as a people through a
combination of incentives of colonial expansion, and the threat of French rivalry
along with simple cultural coercion. In the nineteenth century the French state
had a historic task of turning peasants into Frenchmen.40 The cultural formation of
a nation involved coercion on a large scale even in Europe, even after the initial
phase of coercive homogenization following Westphalia. Tagore took for granted
a historical narrative that erased the formative violence of the European modern
state. But the implication of that fault is not that his analysis was wrong; rather that
it was more accurate than he believed. The purist conception of a homogeneous
 Tagore and critical nationalism 29
nation was a lyrical but lethal falsehood in European history, as much as in the
Indian. Eventually, the Indian experiment successfully squared the circle – by bas-
ing a genuine, intensely felt collective sentiment of being an Indian in a way that
instead of going for a fatal search after purity, learnt to celebrate its diversity –
‘its ocean of humanity’41. Today, as much as in his times, a fundamental task of
political philosophy is to square this circle, and defend it. Reading his novel Gora
in our dark times shows that it contains not merely a riveting narrative, a noble
sentiment, but surprisingly the only political philosophy of collective belonging
that can teach the diverse people of India how to be a ‘nation’.42

Notes
1 This is not to imply that European nationalism was invariably imperialist. In its initial
appearance in European history, nationalism often played an emancipatory role against
large imperial formations from the Spanish dominions to the Napoleonic empire. But
by the time colonial intellectuals like Tagore encountered this amazing political phe-
nomenon, it was inextricably connected to European imperial expansion. For different
trajectories of European nationalism, see Greenfeld (1993).
2 For objections to this simple diffusionist view, see Chatterjee (1993), ch. 1.
3 Kant’s phrase: Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Fourth
Thesis, Kant (1991) p. 44.
4 I have discussed this connection in my ‘collective intentionality’ in Kaviraj (1997:
47–63).
5 Kaviraj (1995), especially chapter 4. For a more detailed argument, Kaviraj (2010).
6 For a detailed discussion of this question, see ibid, ch. 4.
7 Tagore wrote an early comic poem about the effect of such education in European his-
tory on college-going Bengali youth. ‘Banga Bir’ (Heroes of Bengal) in Manasi, RR,
Volume 2, Kolkata: Visvabharati, 1946.
8 For an excellent and exhaustive account of the movement, with considerable attention
given to the evolution of Tagore’s ideas regarding this momentous event, see Sarkar
(1977).
9 Ibid.
10 Sarkar’s work provides a detailed analysis of Tagore’s understanding of the movement,
and its slow transformation. Ibid.
11 He did not enjoy sharp controversy with Leftist radicals; but continued to have very
respectful but often profoundly critical exchanges with Gandhi. Bhattacharya (ed) (2005).
12 Ghare Bairey, RR, Volume 8, English translation, The Home and the World, trans.
Surendranath Tagore, Madras: Macmillan India, 1992; Char Adyay, RR, Volume 13,
Kolkata: Visvabharati, 1946, English translation, Four Chapters, Trans. Rimli Bhat-
tacharya, Kolkata: Srishti Publications, 2003, a shorter novella.
13 See particularly the final sections of Ghare Bairey
14 See the continuing exchanges between the two in Bhattacharya (2005).
15 Tagore wrote some profoundly perceptive essays on this theme in Bengali, ‘Swadeshi
Samaj’, RR, Volume 3: translation in Dasgupta (2009).
16 Swadeshi Samaj.
17 On the use of social imaginaries in the modern world, see Taylor (2004).
18 In reality, Gora – an infant born to Irish parents, probably a soldier of the retreating
British army during the confusion of the 1857 uprising in north India – was sheltered
and raised by his Bengali mother, the wife of an accountant in the army office. His
father always maintained a strict distance from Gora; his mother treated him as God’s
gift of a child to her.
30 Sudipta Kaviraj
19 Swadeshi Samaj.
20 In the Bengali tradition, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, in the generation that immediately
preceded Tagore’s, had presented a profound critique of ‘Westernness’ (paschatya
bhav); but his critique of the modern state was perfunctory, and self-serving – i.e., he
simply pretended that all the main features of representative government were already
part of the Hindu view of political authority (Mukhopadhyay 2010). This was a com-
plex position: on the one hand it conceded the preferability of representative govern-
ment, but its historical claim of Hindu democracy was entirely false. Unlike Tagore,
Bhudev, by this polemical move, avoided grappling with the major question of the
nature of the modern state.
21 De Tocqueville (1994), Volume I, ch. XVI.
22 Bharatvarsher Itihas, RR, Volume 8. And Bharatvarsher Itihaser Dhara, RR, Volume 18.
23 This was the tradition of constitutionalist reasoning from Locke to Montesquieu to the
Federalist Papers (Taylor 1990).
24 In two of his plays, Raja and Raktakarabi, it is a deeply self-alienated king who con-
trols the forces of technology which shrivel the lives of his subjects, and his own. In
Muktadhara, the connection between political authority and technological enslave-
ment is not direct.
25 I deliberately put the term ‘patriotic’ in quotes, because, as we shall see, some of think-
ing on this subject are entirely discordant with the usual meaning of this word.
26 For a more detailed analysis of this poetic trend, see ‘A strange love of abstractions:
Bengali patriotic poetry’ in (Kaviraj 2015).
27 As in Bankimchandra’s famous poem, Bande Mataram.
28 Kaviraj (2015)especially ch. 4.
29 ‘Amar sonar bangla, ami tomay bhalobasi’.
30 ‘Sarthaka janama amar, janmechi ei deshe/ sarthaka janama ma go tomay bhalobese’.
(Blessed I am in being born in this land, blessed in loving you, mother.)
31 There is a parallel distinction in the world of figural images of the mother. The first
painting of Bharatmata (Mother India) by Tagore’s nephew, the artist Abanindranath
Tagore, was a gentle, beneficent figure; but it was gradually replaced by figures which
exude power and invincibility.
32 Sometimes the land is seen as unfortunate because of its enslavement, but rarely
because what it has done to its own people – for which it ought to atone.
33 Jare tumi nice thela, se tomare taniche je nice
  Pascate rekhecho jare, se tomare paschate taniche
  Vidhar rudra roshe, durbhiksher dware base
  Bhag kare khete habe sakaler sathe annapan
  Apamane hote habe tahader sabar saman.
  Those whom you push down, they are pulling you downwards
  Those whom have left behind, they are pulling you from behind
  Facing the terrible wrath of the Maker, sitting at the door of famine/catastrophe
  Your will have to learn to share your food and drink with everyone
  You will have to learn to be equal to everybody else in taking insults. (translation mine)
34 Poem 106, Gitanjali, RR, Volume 11.
35 Ranadhara bahi, jaygan gahi unmad kalarabe
  Bhedi marupath giri parvat jara esechilo sabe
  Tara mor majhe sabai biraje keha nahe nahe dur
  Amar sonite royeche dvanite tar- vicitra sur
  He rudravina bajo bajo bajo, ghrna kari dure ache jara ajo
  Bandha nasibe tarao asibe dandabe ghire
  Ei bharater mahamanaber sagaratire
36 See Vajpeyi (2012) for an examination of different versions of this moral imaginary.
Chapter 2: ‘Viraha: The Self’s Longing’ discusses Tagore.
37 Tagore, Nationalism, London: Macmillan, 1918, 59–60.
 Tagore and critical nationalism 31
38 In a recent paper, James Tully has called for a ‘de-parochializing political theory’: a
major task of contemporary political theory should be look for a new kind of politi-
cal order, or state based on these no-nation or non-nation principle. See James Tully,
‘­De-parochializing political theory’, Journal of World Philosophies, 2017.
39 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2009.
40 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.
41 In the complex line of his famous poem, mahamanaber sagara-tire – on the shores
of this sea of great humanity. It is interesting that he found the use of the mere term
‘humanity’ (manav) inadequate, precisely because it found a place within itself of a
greater humanity (mahamanav).
42 I have attempted to give a more directly conceptual account of this squared circle –
how it is possible to think of a non-European conception of a nation, following thinkers
like Tagore and Gandhi in a separate paper: ‘Nation/nation-state’, Workshop on ‘Con-
ceptual Itineraries: Routes and Roots of the Political’, SOAS, London, June 10, 2017.

References
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. 2005. The Mahatma and the Poet. New Delhi: National Book
Trust.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Dasgupta, Uma, 2009. The Oxford India Tagore: Selected Writings on Education and
Nationalism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. 1994. Democracy in America. London: Everyman’s Library.
Greenfeld, Liah. 1993. Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1995. The Unhappy Consciousness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1997. ‘Collective Forms in Modern Politics,’ in Kathryn Dean (ed.), Politics and
the Ends of Identity. London: Ashgate, pp. 47–63.
———. 2010. ‘Indian Nationalism,’ in Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (eds.),
Oxford Companion to Indian Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2015. Invention of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2017. ‘Nation/Nation-State,’ unpublished paper presented at workshop on ‘Con-
ceptual Itineraries: Routes and Roots of the Political,’ School of Oriental and African
Studies, London, 10 June.
Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev. 2010. Samajik Prabandha in Prabandha Samagra. Kolkata:
Carchapad.
Nandy, Ashis, 1994. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sarkar, Sumit. 1977. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House.
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———. 2003. Four Chapters. Trans. Rimli Bhattacharya. Kolkata: Srishti Publications.
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———. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vajpeyi, Ananya. 2012. Righteous Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2 Midnight’s children
Religion and nationalism in South Asia1
Giorgio Shani

On February 14, 2019, an Indian Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy
was rammed by an SUV carrying an improvised explosive device in the town of
Pulwama in Indian-controlled Kashmir.2 At least 40 soldiers were killed along with
the suicide bomber, Adil Ahmed Dhar, a local Kashmiri militant who belonged
to the jihadi terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in Pakistan.3 Within hours,
Indian troops had been deployed to the border and the prospect of war between the
two nuclear-armed neighbors, South Asia’s ‘midnight’s children’ (Rushdie 1981)
born over 70 years previously in an orgy of violence, seemed very real.
India and Pakistan became independent states on the stroke of midnight on
August 14 (Pakistan) and August 15 (India), 1947. Like South Asia, Kashmir had
been partitioned at birth. A Muslim majority state ruled by a Hindu maharajah, it
had been incorporated by India at Independence. However, India’s claim to Kash-
mir was contested by Pakistan, which invaded Kashmir shortly after Partition.
The United Nations was called in to broker a ceasefire and divided Kashmir along
a line of control, but no final border was established. Further attempts were made
by Pakistan to redraw the border by force, most notably in 1965 and then in 1999,
when nuclear war was barely avoided, but the line of control separating colonial
India’s midnight’s children in the northwest has remained unchanged.
Although nominally secular states, India and Pakistan came into being as a
result of political mobilization along religious lines. Both the Indian National
Congress (INC) and particularly the Muslim League had, to varying degrees,4
made use of religious imagery and symbols in the campaign for independence.
The partitioning of colonial India on the grounds of religion by the British, it is
argued, placed constraints on the secular articulation of nationalism. Although the
emergence of religious nationalism in South Asia may be seen as a modern phe-
nomenon, the origins of what are termed ‘communal’ identities in the subconti-
nent lie in British colonial rule. In particular, colonial policies of classification and
enumeration (Kaviraj 2010) through the Census (Cohn 1996) and subsequently
the introduction of separate electorates, facilitated the development of ‘commu-
nal’ consciousness in colonial India (Pandey 1990). This will be discussed in the
first section of the chapter that explores the impact of colonial policies on the
construction of ‘religion’ as a category in South Asia.