Nationalism in South Asia

The rise of religious and ethnic nationalisms in South Asia was inevitable. Discuss.

  The Uttar Pradesh government recently passed an ordinance prohibiting coerced religious conversion through marriage. Forceful conversion was already illegal – Love jihad, as these interfaith marriages are called, is just the most recent manifestation of the violent, Islamophobic nationalism that pervades contemporary political discourse and the state’s policies. Interfaith marriages are deemed threatening to the purity of Hinduism. What is threatening to India’s religious and ethnic majorities is deemed a threat to the idea of India. In God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy writes “That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” (Roy 1997, p. 33).

According to the dangerously pervasive nationalist view, ‘anti-nationals’ are responsible for eroding the precious Indian values and traditions upon whose foundation this nation was built. In this paper, I argue that the rise of religious and ethnic nationalisms was inevitable. However, this rise was not the result of any organic emotional sentiments that emerged from the collective consciousness of South Asians. Instead, I believe that these nationalisms were discursively shaped by the reconfiguration of ‘identity’ under the colonial state and the independence struggle. Locating this inquiry in South Asia is in itself an affirmation of the long history of such nationalisms; it comprises the separate states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as a consequence of the bloody experiences of Partition. The fundamentalism of identity formation and nationalism fragmented South Asian states from their inception. In this paper, ‘India’ loosely refers to undivided India under colonial rule, which later splintered into ‘South Asia.’

Colonial Strategies of Power and the Advent of Modernity

Precolonial societies were certainly stratified and regulated, but it was the colonial enterprise that consolidated the scattered empires of South Asia into a single colonial state (Khare 1989). South Asia spent nearly 200 years under British rule. During the early days of colonialism, as local revolts were unsuccessful and British supremacy seemed grand and impenetrable, intellectuals, peasants, businesspeople, and artists sought to unravel why Indians were utterly unable to defeat their colonialists (Chatterjee 1986). Of course, the obvious answer was that of Britain’s superior military might. But this led to related queries: what had enabled such great technological advancements in the first place? How was Britain’s political and military power being deployed in such a coordinated, strategic, cohesive fashion – as opposed to the disaggregated Indian natives?

Ultimately, European military might came to be revered as a by-product of the overarching ascendency of modern European social organisation and rationalist thought (Kaviraj 2010). Britain’s success as a colonial regime was attributed to the nationalistic unity powering their battle strategies, bureaucratic procedures and business deals. The nation state had brought to its population a sense of belonging and pride. It had allowed the British to think and act as a collective, as a national unit. To the Indian eye, rationalism and modernity was a project that had worked. It provided a reason for colonial oppression, and to many, it provided an escape from it. The Young Bengal Movement of the 1830s exhibited this sensibility that regarded European progressiveness and modernity as attainable for the Indian subcontinent (Kundu 1996). Rather than accept some intrinsic racialised inferiority, Indian intellectuals who were dissatisfied with their state of subjugation viewed the political formation of a modern nation as a portable, imitable political structure. 

 Under the traumatic and coercive regime of colonialism, this desire to mimic colonial institutions cannot be simplistically accepted as an anti-English political stratagem based on an objective assessment of the different patterns of socio-political organisation. Dipesh Chakrabarty submits that through the education system, European imperialism indoctrinated individuals to privilege decidedly Western metanarratives of science, homogeneity and nation states (1992). The colonial subject can respond to European modernisation in three broad terms: entirely repudiating modern science and technology to stick by religion; shedding traditional forms of knowledge to pledge allegiance to the new colonial sources of authority; or finally, attempting to reconcile the two modes of thought through reform and revision (Smith 1971). The third reaction, witnessed in several influential Indian intellectuals, induces ambivalence in the Indian subject, who is left “not quite/not white” as they apply post-Enlightenment standards to rectify inadequacies in indigenous religious and cultural practices (Bhabha 1984, p. 132).

In the process of marking out the bad faith customs from those necessary to sustain traditional culture and knowledge, Smith argues that the exercise becomes an excavation of the ‘essence’ or ‘core of traditional life (1971). Therefore, for the revivalist reformer, renegotiating sources of authority and discourses of power transforms into the revival of a mythical golden age where the ‘essence’ of inhabitants was intact and ascendant. Hence the ideology cultivated through this endeavour is not simply the diffusion of modernity into the imagination of the intellectuals because of external invasion. Instead, it is a careful competition between Western and indigenous ways of being that fight for cultural dominance, merely set off by modernisation. Reformist-revivalist nationalism, “therefore, stems from competition, but on the immaterial, psychological ground first, and must be seen as an indigenous creation” (Jaffrelot 2003, p. 24).

This “indigenous creation” of nationalism is at once mimicking and affirming the indisputable strengths of colonial ideology, and attempting to subvert it by reconstructing local histories. For instance, as Christian missionaries disparaged Hinduism for its multitude of god-figures, Hindu pandits rewrote Vedic history to include a period of monotheism as a kind of reconciliatory reform (Jaffrelot 2003). This reaction indicates that on some level, the pandits bought into the appeal of modernist monotheism. With this reform, the pandits also critiqued Christianity as having three gods – making the now-monotheistic Hinduism ‘more modern’ and therefore attractive on the terms of the proselytising British. This example shows how the boundaries between the alienOther of white power and the oppressed self of the colonial subject introduce tension into the nationalist nation-building project. As Partha Chatterjee pointedly asks, “Can nationalist thought produce a discourse of order while daring to negate the very foundations of a system of knowledge that has conquered the world?” (1986, p. 42). All Indian nationalisms, including the reformist-revivalist’s, were influenced by their oppressor’s frame of thinking. In an anxious effort to rehabilitate and protect traditional values and histories, the emerging nationalisms were modelled off the strategies of power that were effective and internalised as superior. The strategy of colonial power produced itself through constructing binaries like white/brown, modern/traditional, civilised/savage and east/west. As a result, the nationalisms borne out of this context shared a certain homology to colonial strategies in their commitment to demarcating a self and an Other.

To justify this position, I will look at the lexicon of nationalism used by Nehru and Gandhi whose visions for the future and philosophies of anti-colonialism were both massively influential, and ostensibly secular and egalitarian. Where Sarvarkar’s nationalism might have been expected to contain identitarian politics, Nehru and Gandhi’s treatises capture the inescapability of religious and ethnic nationalisms in this subcontinent.

Nehru’s Nationalism – Of Mimicry and Modernity

In Discovery of India (1946), Nehru describes India as a palimpsest upon which multiple inscriptions of dreams and ideology were carved in succession, yet miraculously, no layer erased or overcame the previous layer entirely. The title of his text captures its nationalist politics: Nehru presents India as a pre-existing golden age capable of ‘discovery’ like a waiting archaeological site forced off-limits by meddlesome colonialists. ‘India’ was not a constructed imposition, but “an emotional experience which overpowered” him, whose “essential unity had been so powerful that no political division, no disaster or catastrophe, had been able to overcome it” (p. 59). In this historiography, Nehru glosses over inconvenient conflicts, religious tension or cultural competition in service of his vision of plurality all because of an underlying reformist-revivalist ‘Indian-ness.’ For instance, while describing the Afghan invasions, he repeatedly emphasises how their “process of indianization was rapid,” their language was “basically derived from Sanskrit” and “they looked to India as their home country and had no other affiliations” (p. 238). At every turn, difference is minimised and played down as short term or presented as part of some broader Indian ethos and philosophy. Violent cultural interactions are recast as amicable and swift, barely causing a ripple in the golden age of the past.

Such a romanticised evocation of a secular, syncretic past might seem harmless or even beneficial in reducing communalism or ethnonationalism. However, Nehru’s idealistic commitment to an “essential” India frequently slips into a reductive and out of touch view of the diversity of South Asia and the potential risks associated with this. The difficult and polycentric questions of how a geographical territory so vast and varied would be brought under the single edifice of the nation state are trivialised by his far-removed, fetishising intellectual gaze. For example, despite all his cosmopolitanism, Nehru glorified the village unit as some kind of literary, moral, and spiritual haven, musing how, “Sometimes, as I was passing along a country road, or through a village, I would start with surprise on seeing a fine type of man, or a beautiful woman, who reminded me of some fresco of ancient times. And I wondered how the type endured and continued through ages” (p. 67-8). Here, not only do we see an overwhelmingly romantic and poeticised image of rural India, but also Nehru’s sense that these villages typify ‘Indian-ness.’ Since Nehru has yoked village life to the idea of India, he seems at best, ambivalent to confronting its parochialism and reforming its discriminatory structures. While discussing the caste system he tellingly quotes Sir George Birdwood, “ ‘So long as the Hindus hold to the caste system, India will be India; but from the day they break from it, there will be no more India” (p. 247). Such a strongly historically rooted and essentialising nationalism insulates fundamentalist, bigoted, or otherwise oppressive systems of the past from the radical changes they desperately need, precisely in order to prevent religious and ethnic nationalism from infiltrating the modern state.

Further, Nehruvian nationalism is “anxious” to “give her [India] the garb of modernity” (p. 50). He invests faith in certain policies for the modernnation  (like the reservation system and a socialist economy^[1]) while rejecting others (the partition^[2]) on the basis of a set of trans-historical and trans-discursive values that he believes can be prescinded and identified as Indian. These values play neatly into his alarmingly Orientalist perspective of South Asian populations as homogenous, peace-loving, almost primitive: “The Indian outlook, even of the masses, has never approved of the spirit of acquisitiveness” (p. 522). Equality, socialism and democracy are painted as existing in some form in India’s antecedent societies^[3]. They are part of the Indian spirit and Nehru explicitly argues for a natural affinity that this country would have to his particular conception of political morality and ideals. In this way, Nehru’s nationalism spins its myth by dialectically idealising colonial modernism, and resisting its hegemony by harking back to a golden past. Colonialists were respected for their modern sensibilities, but placed definitively as diametric Others, separate from the Indian golden age. It is this spirit of reviving the past that works within the problematic binaries of the self and the other, predisposing communities to religious and ethnic essentialism. By employing the cognitive faculties of essentialism to achieve the freedom from colonialism, postcolonial degeneration into the identitarian nationalism was possible, expected – inevitable.

Gandhianism – Anarchism Turned Identarian

Gandhi’s vision for the future of the subcontinent would have been an anarchist utopia (1997). Unlike Nehru, he was sharply critical of political representation and modern civilisation^[4]. In Hind Swaraj, he highlights an ineluctable incompatibility between European modern civilisation and his pursuit of the absolute moral truth. Yet this personal rejection of modernity was ultimately both subordinated to the political agenda of an anti-colonial ‘national movement,’ and also undermined by Gandhi’s related slippages into the trap of nationalism. As Gandhi strove to explicate his political philosophy of nonviolence within the framework of a nation state, he defaulted to bald Orientalism, essentialising how, “By her very nature, India is a lover of peace…The Turks have been fighters for centuries…The people of India have followed the path of peace for thousands of years…” (Divine Warning p. 426-7 as quoted in Chatterjee 1986). The Indian essence was the superior self, the Other was the alien West or neighbouring invaders.

As in Nehru, we see a real resistance to change because of some moral truth that allegedly lay preserved in India’s essence. The West was vituperatively attacked for its totalitarian knowledge systems and intricately hierarchised operations. Although Gandhi recognised the falsity of the British claim to absolute truth, he did not see fault in the idea of some absolute moral truth existing, only with the truth of the West. Here again, there is loyalty to the confines of binaries of the East and the West – “our Eastern institutions” are pitted against the unfamiliar foreigner (p. 151). Furthermore, he believed that this reigning, universal moral truth could be found in his national project of India. Gandhi’s advocacy for a return to the sacred past was grounded in the faith that Indian civilisation had discovered the Truth. He repackaged the dominant, stagnant village institution as a positive and preferable form of living. For him, “India was resistant to change because it was not necessary for it to change: its civilisation had found the true principles of social organisation” (Chatterjee 1986, p. 103). 

Finally, despite Gandhi’s explicit disavowal of Western thought, it was in that distinctive post-Enlightenment vocabulary of “truer socialism and a truer communism,” “capital and labour,” “citizenship” and “spirit of scientific inquiry” in which he articulated his hopes for the East and grudges with the West (Gandhi 1920).  Both Nehru and Gandhi’s nationalisms are particularly fascinating because they both overtly repudiate religious and ethnic nationalism, but their lexicon ended up introducing a cognitive grid both perfectly suited, and which inevitably turned to religion and ethnicity after the political project of the nation state had been accomplished. This framework of the self/other was a way to mobilise the masses against colonial rule. But post-independence,  the politics of an essential self turned fundamentalist and ethnic because of the mediation of identity under the British.

The Fixity of Identity and the Ease of Hatred

The first census in 1872 irreversibly created the material infrastructure to know a population through cartography, counting, and demography, along with the cognitive and political infrastructure to identify groups, numerical majorities, and boundaries (Kaviraj 2010). It spawned a new political ontology for subjects which froze what it meant to belong to a group. Where previously identities were imprecise, borderless and rhizomatic, colonial rule imposed fixity, homogeneity and hierarchy in order to govern more efficiently. Which is to say that individuals were not only aware of their multiple identities like caste, gender, class, religion and so on, but also they learnt to rank them in order of how big an impact the category had on their social being (Kapur 2012). The colonial state and its pursuit of modernity thereby “‘objectified’ identity groups…They designated not groups of people who could fall under some specific description, but groups which putatively acted as single collective actors” (Kaviraj 2014, p. ). This cognitive shift in the approach to identity is what makes it possible to hold groups and philosophies accountable for the actions of individuals; generalising the existence of individual traits and agency to a larger collective identity.

The reconfigured, freshly minted ethnic and religious identities were henceforth under the mandate of the state, meaning that they acquired a new political significance. As Foucault memorably wrote in Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap…under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth” (1975, p. 554-62). The modern colonial state created the categories of identity, and soon they were invested with political, economic and emotional depth. Religion and ethnicity have been an integral dimension of communal living for centuries, but the recognition of these categories by the state for the first time added the possible benefits of greater bargaining power, resources, and protection (Lonsdale 1922). As Jaffrelot notes, “ethnicity is a social construct which constitutes first and foremost a resource for acting in the context of social competition…ethnicity is in itself an ideological invention based on the shaping of some Golden Age” (2003, p. 42). The same principle of conflict theory applies to both ethnicity and religion. The fabrication of myths surrounding these identities is necessary to sell it to individuals and for them to be regarded with a deep, personal emotion and unchanging historicity.

Thus, the rise of social and ethnic nationalisms was inevitable. European modernisation and the anti-colonial resistance normalised and inscribed violent binaries of the self and the Other into South Asian masses. The nation-building project depended on the creation of strong identification with the national to facilitate the mobilisation of the masses under a single banner. Once the intelligentsia had obtained independence from the British Other, the collective neural pathways of essentialism persisted, and the Other was decided based on ethnicity and religion.

Saffron and The Original Sin

Today’s pernicious laws that regulate love and saffronise patriotism have a long intellectual and political history in India. The oft-discussed politics of the ‘nation-building project’ produced more than one nation. It was essentialism itself that splintered the myth of a unified South Asia. Religious and ethnic nationalisms are “powerful, easy, incendiary, contagious prose” under whose “altered optics of belonging, agency and responsibility, it becomes possible to be fluent in the deadly languages of modern hatred” (Kaviraj 5). If we are to resist the Islamophobia and racism of today’s nationalisms, detaching from the binarisms and confines of frozen modern identity might be a fruitful place to start. 

Works Cited

Banerji, Ranjona. “Anyone Who Does Not Worship Narendra Modi Is an Anti-National.” National Herald, 9 Feb. 2020, http://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/anyone-who-does-not-worship-narendra-modi-is-an-anti-national.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, vol. 37, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–26., doi:10.1525/rep.1992.37.1.99p0090f.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print.

Chowdhury, Debasish Roy. “Laws Against ‘Love Jihad’ Further Erode India’s Democracy.” Time, Time, 1 Dec. 2020, time.com/5915872/love-jihad-india-democracy/.

Gandhi, ‘Discussions with Students’, CW, vol.58, p.219.

Gandhi, ‘Zamindars and Talukdars’, CW, vol.42, pp.239-40.

Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Cambridge ; New York :Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “A Strange Love of the Land: Identity, Poetry and Politics in the (Un)Making of South Asia.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 10, 2014, doi:10.4000/samaj.3756.

Mishra, Abhishek. “JNU A Centre Of Excellence, But It’s The Anti-National Forces That Must Be Exposed.” Https://Www.outlookindia.com/, Outlookindia.com, 15 June 2020, http://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-jnu-must-get-rid-of-anti-national-forces-to-transform-into-centre-of-educational-excellence/354797.

On the Structure of Nationalist Discourse. (2010). The Imaginary Institution of India. doi:10.7312/kavi15222-003 

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997

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^[1] India’s social organisation in groups and collectives of the village and the joint family is antithetical to the individualising tendencies of capitalism. The Communist Party’s rejection of a glorious past and its traditions and opposition to nationalist rhetoric is the reason why Nehru believes CPI  has failed to strike a chord. CPI “has cut itself off from the springs of national sentiment and speaks in a language which finds no echo in the hearts of the people. It remains an energetic, but small group, with no real roots (p. 517).

^[2] “I think this sentiment has been artificially created and has no roots in the Moslem mind” (p. 528). Nehru charges the partition’s supporters with emotionality, imagination and invention, and the corollary of that is that a unified India is not merely imagined and emotion – rather that is has a material cultural and historical justification.

^[3] “The essential ideals of Indian culture are broad-based and can be adapted to almost any environment. The bitter conflict between science and religion which shook up Europe in the nineteenth century would have no reality in India, nor would change based on the applications of science bring any conflict with those ideals” he says about the implementation of democratic socialism and an equal state (p. 518).

^[4] As Chatterjee writes, “For Gandhi, it is precisely because Indians were seduced by the glitter of modern civilization that they became a subject people. And what keeps them in subjection is the acceptance by leading sections of lndians of the supposed benefits of civilization” (1986, p. 86).