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9 Historiography of Indian Nationalism PDF
9 Historiography of Indian Nationalism PDF
Academic Script
During the period of more than half a century after India’s independence in 1947, both optimism and
at times disenchantment about the Indian state have come to influence historical judgments about
nationalism. The nationalist historians celebrating the emancipatory outcome of the national
movement inherited from their early twentieth century predecessors the historical critique of
imperialism. The critique of imperialism of the kind that Dadabhai Naoroji offered in his Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India or R.C.Dutt in his Economic History of India indicted British rule for
keeping India economically backward, and for denying Indians the right of self-rule. It is well-known
how such historical understanding of the essential malevolence (evil) of imperial rule laid out the
ideological foundations of nationalism, just in the same way as nationalist archaeologists and art
historians celebrated the cultural achievements of India to contain the imperial practice of attaching
labels of inferiority to Indian culture. Recent works by scholars like Vasudha Dalmiya or Tapati Guha
Thakurta have drawn attention to a certain nationalist engagement with India’s cultural heritage in
what has been labelled as the nationalist public sphere, constituted as it was by print and visual
culture.
As far as the history of the Indian nationalist movement is concerned, researches by professional
historians during the last few decades have raised questions about the sanctity of the ideological
commitments of the nationalist protagonists by concentrating on the interplay of interest and power in
shaping the politics of nationalism. It has been often argued that the dilution of the emancipatory
promises of the national movement after the Indian National Congress achieved power, was built into
the game of politics for power that the nationalist politicians had played out even during the phase of
anti-colonial movements. This was one reason, as Marxist critics of the Congress and the
practitioners of subaltern history have argued, why the Congress had time and again tried to restrain
the militant spirit of popular movements from below, often by calling off a movement, as Gandhi did
during the height of the non-cooperation agitation, when it reached a level of militancy. The subaltern
historians however go beyond this by suggesting that the ordinary people, predominantly peasants
in a country like India periodically mobilized themselves without depending on the initiatives of the
elite politicians. The thesis of self-mobilization indicated among other things an unbridgeable divide
between elite politics represented by the Congress and popular politics which always displayed
greater militancy. Earlier during the 1960’s several scholars found a cultural divide between what was
perceived as an abstract nation in a multi-cultural society and regions which had their distinct regional
cultural traditions. Regional movements in post-colonial India created a more acute awareness about
regionalism, that apparently ran counter to nationalism once the nation came into being and tried to
create a homogenous national culture. The fragments of the nation came to look upon such
homogenizing trends with disfavour, as pointed at by Partha Chatterjee succinctly in his Fragments
of the Nation.
The combination of the intellectuals with the people, represented by Gandhi according to nationalist
historiography, brought about more intense pressures on the British Empire. Large scale agitations
which however were never uniform and came in cycles and touched different regions unevenly none
the less put so much of pressure on the British that the Imperial rulers eventually realized that ruling
India had become an impossible proposition. On the other side of the fence the chain of commands
that the Congress had created by establishing local organizations resembled an alternative stage.
A new generation of leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel or Rajendra Prasad came to constitute
the new general staff of Gandhi’s army. Such accounts suggest that as a consequence of the
initiatives of the Congress organizations and nationalist volunteers, the peasants who had remained
hitherto outside the purview of nationalist mobilizations, began to feature as important actors in the
Congress. Disagreements however centred on the precise motivations behind such mobilizations.
Some saw in this the impact of nationalist idealism; the more sceptical among historians emphasized
elitist manipulations of peasant grievances. The theory of manipulation ultimately converges with the
standard Marxist argument about imperfections in such mobilizations. If the peasants looked
anxiously towards the Congress for leadership in their struggle for genuine freedom, the latter was
intent on diffusing the tension generated by the anti-landlord evocation of peasant mobilization. The
history of the Congress mobilization of the peasants according to Vinita Damodaran’s Broken
Promises, was a story of betrayal as their leaders went back on their promises of a just world.
However imperfect, this was still mobilization on a grand scale. In a well-known research on the
Congress mobilization of the peasants in Uttar Pradesh, Mazid Siddiqi argued that apart from
creating nationalists out of peasants the Congress taught them the basic lessons of organization. In
the process the Congress generated a certain kind of peasant militancy which they also wished to
restrain, yet peasant nationalism in Siddiqi’s opinion suggested the emergence of an alternative
nationalism. Mass nationalism therefore was a linear sequel to the emergence of nationalist
consciousness in the late nineteenth century. If nationalism in the nineteenth century had infected the
mind of the leaders it entered the heart of the people in the age of mass nationalism.
This new understanding came to influence the writing of the history of Indian nationalism as historians
sought to reconcile the existence of numerous ‘little nations’, shaped by regional cultural identities
within the broader framework of a Unitarian nationalism. Some historians like D.A. Low in his
persuasive introduction in Soundings in modern South Asian Histories (1968) went to the extent of
suggesting that it is only at a rather ‘rarefied level that modern Indian history may be said to comprise
a single all-India story’. The distinct regions in India contained independent dynamics of politics. In
explaining the lack of national uniformities in Indian society some of its inherent cultural divisions
were given greater prominence.
The story of the emergence of the Congress’s popular mobilizations has come out from a large
number of regional studies on the national movement. The focus has often been on the political
career of leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad or Subhash Chandra
Bose, whose roles as popular leaders have figured prominently in studies of Indian nationalism. It is
not as if the Congress hegemony in Indian politics remained unchallenged. Muslim separatism for
example, emerged in the early twentieth century as one such challenge, that ultimately accounted for
the partition of the country preceded by gruesome communal riots. Yet the recognition of such
discordant tendencies does not take away from the history of nationalism its ideological commitment
to freedom from British rule.
The Subaltern Historiography: The Thesis of Self-mobilization of the Peasantry
During the decade of the 1980’s a new interpretation on Indian nationalism was represented by
historians who contributed to the series of volumes of subaltern studies, and began to raise questions
about the intentions and impact of the strategy of mass-mobilization by the Congress. The new
historiographical position represented by the subaltern studies put greater emphasis on the
independent self-mobilization by the peasants, under stressing in the process what had earlier been
studied as a successful strategy of popular mobilization. Gyanendra Pandey for example, in an
influential essay in the first volume of the subaltern studies, joined issues with Mazid Siddiqi’s version
of peasant politics in Uttar Pradesh. Pandey criticized Siddiqi for ignoring the autonomy of peasant
politics and their capacity of self-mobilization under independent peasant leadership. According to
this interpretation it seemed no longer sufficient to analyze the imperfections in the nationalist
mobilizations, for whatever be the imperfections; they arose from some fundamental divergences of a
long-term nature rooted in conflicting consciousness and aspirations. If the Congress and the
peasants came together, their togetherness survived only for a short duration. The class alignments
in the Congress made the separation between the two levels of politics inevitable.
It is generally accepted that since pre-colonial times the peasants had been participating in various
types of protest activity. Such kinds of protests continued during colonial rule as well. The subaltern
studies group came to attach greater importance to the continuity of such independent movements,
often directed against local oppressor who might have been politically aligned with the Congress,
despite the emergence of a pan–Indian multi-class framework of protests against foreign rule. While
in the standard nationalist accounts the people, peasants or the urban poor, belonged to a hierarchy
within the nationalist formation, the subaltern studies identified the divergence between the elite and
the people as the source of a major divide in Indian politics. Apparently the peasants were the
peasants first and the peasants last. Occasional convergences of their autonomous movements with
the town based nationalist movements did not conceal the more prominent and profound divergences
manifest in the peasants’ sense of distance from the outsider leadership.
The subaltern story of accommodating independent peasant mobilization of course gave a distinct
space to the politics of the ordinary people in the grand narrative of nationalism. Their insights
enabled historians to recognize that people while participating in the nationalist movements spoke in
many voices, had distinct aspirations and looked upon the leaders of the movements as deliverers
from oppression. For many such rural followers of the Congress Gandhi Maharaj represented a
promise of a just and equitable world, ‘Ramrajya’ to use Gandhi’s own language. Yet in their
appreciation of nationalism such historians had betrayed a one-track concern with peasants’
independent consciousness. The result had been a tendency to assess nationalism in terms of
preoccupations which are more consistent with the ideals of egalitarian reconstruction of the nation
rather than the story of its creation under British rule. To look at the national movement from the
position of an ideal type peasant rebellion has the danger of missing out on the impact of a process of
mobilization through which the peasants came to identify with the nationalist ideal. The mobilization
on a grand scale indeed widened the geographical orbit of the nation. There were leaders who carried
the message of nationalism from the town to the country, even though many of them eventually failed
to achieve prominence in the politics of post-independent India. With the rise of mass-nationalism the
intermediary levels of leadership became important in the Congress. New aspirants for Congress
leadership at the national level had to depend on their support, while many of these intermediary
leaders like, Rajendra Prasad moved up in the Congress hierarchy. It is very difficult to visualize a
situation where men like Rajendra Prasad who had intimate rural connections were looked upon as
outsiders.
The subaltern historiography in a sense has been a continuation of an already existing left-wing critic
of the Congress, proceeding from the assumption that the main objective of the Congress movement
was to create a free world, using freedom in a much larger sense than what was implied in the limited
objective of freedom from British rule, they tended to ignore somewhat the multi-class imperatives of
nationalism. Nationalism wished to create an independent nation state. Its ideals were certainly
nurtured by a feeling of cultural greatness but in practice the national movement required constant
negotiations with forces that stood in the way of achieving the ideals of a free and independent
nation. These are problems which cannot be understood adequately by studying local politics or
independent peasant movements. The study of nationalism requires therefore a Unitarian framework
and a certain empathy for those who tried to translate the nationalist dream into a political reality.
GLOSSARY
Gandhian Era
The period between 1920 and 1947 when Gandhi was the foremost leader of the Congress who
negotiated with the British government. This era covered the Dandi March, Non-Cooperation, and
Civil Disobedience movements and the Round Table Conferences.
Nationalism
Devotion to one’s national identity among the people of a particular country; aspirations for national
independence from foreign domination.
Gyanendra Pandey
A historian and founding member of the Subaltern studies project.
Ramrajya
The ideal of a just and equitable country envisaged by Gandhi to encourage the masses of India to
participate in anti-British movements.
Unitarian
The concept that Indians had unilaterally joined the national movement due to the unifying force of
the spread of nationalistic ideas, and underplays the existence of other factors.
Subaltern history
An approach to history that is focused more on what happens among the masses, their conditions
and the role played by them in history.
FAQs
1. What was the main contention of nationalist scholars regarding nationalism?
Nationalist scholars like Dadabhai Naoroji in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India or
R.C.Dutt in his Economic History of India indicted British rule for keeping India economically
backward, and for denying Indians the right of self-rule. They felt that it was the oppression
and humiliation suffered under British rule that laid out the ideological foundations of
nationalism.
3. What are the theories regarding peasant participation in the nationalist movement?
There is a difference of opinion among historians regarding the nature of peasant motivations
in the nationalist movement. Some argued that it was the consequence of the impact of
nationalist idealism, while the more sceptical among historians emphasized elitist
manipulations of peasant grievances. The theory of manipulation converges with the standard
Marxist argument about imperfections in such mobilizations. It has also been asserted that if
the peasants looked anxiously towards the Congress for leadership in their struggle for
genuine freedom, the latter was intent on diffusing the tension generated by the anti-landlord
evocation of peasant mobilization. According to Mazid Siddiqi peasant nationalism suggested
the emergence of an alternative nationalism.
4. What was the main contention of the American school of historians about the nature of
nationalism?
The American school of historians asserted that there existed strong regional identities that ran
counter to the aspirations of nationalism. The idea of a nationalist leadership gave way to the
concept of regional elites who drew on distinct regional cultural traditions as political resources.
Their study revealed that the nation tended to imply completely different things in different
cultural regions. Some historians like D.A.Low went to the extent of suggesting that it was only
at a rather ‘rarefied level that modern Indian history may be said to comprise a single all-India
story’.
5. State the main difference in outlook between nationalist and subaltern scholars?
While the standard nationalist accounts opined that the peasants or the urban poor, belonged
to a hierarchy within the nationalist formation, the subaltern studies identified the divergence
between the elite and the common people as the source of a major divide in Indian politics.
The peasants were always regarded as a class apart, and the occasional convergences of
their autonomous movements with the town based nationalist movements, did not conceal the
more prominent and profound divergences manifest in the peasants’ sense of distance from
the outsider leadership.
7. What sort of ‘individual motivation’ does Christopher Bailey point to when discussing
nationalist leadership?
Christopher Bailey has put forth the opinion that local factions were organizing protests against
the British in response to opportunities for power that the imperial government offered through
constitutional reforms. It was the lure of power that was drawing them to politics, for such
powers could be effectively used to pursue self-interest and buttress their local dominance.
These local notables, who belonged to either powerful trading or land holding groups, forged
connections with lawyers, journalists and the educated classes, in order to use such
connections effectively in electoral politics and nationalist mobilizations, to further their own
interests.
Chaudhury, Sashibhusan, ‘Civil Disturbances during British Rule in India 1765-1857’, Calcutta, World
Press, 1955.
Majumdar, R. C., ‘The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857’, Calcutta, Firma KLM, 1957.
Stokes, Eric., ‘The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in
Colonial India’, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Mukherjee, Rudrangsu., ‘Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858: A Study of Popular Resistance’, Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1984.
Metcalf, T. R.; ‘The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857-1870’; Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1964
Hardiman, David, ‘Peasant Resistance in India, 1858-1914’, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar (ed.); ‘Nationalist Movement in India: A Reader’, Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Weblinks
http://archive.org/details/indiannationalis00paniiala [