SO MANY NATIONALISMS
An examination of a particular era in the history of Punjab shows the crisscrossing of multiple currents of nationalism
The concept of nationalism, as a political idea, continues to enthuse scholars. This is partly because the idea of nationalism is seen as sacred, uplifting and desirable and also because attempting to make sense of it is intellectually challenging. Empirical evidence, however, of what nationalism has accomplished points to glaring disappointment. Among all the major works, Anderson’s idea of imagined communities has inspired a vast amount of scholarship. Not surprisingly, this book presents his argument as a major reference point. What else could be gleaned theoretically from postanderson scholarship? Some say the last word on the subject has been spoken. That should be seen as blasphemous because in research, there is no such thing as the last word. This book is a fascinating addition on the subject of nationalism. This is particularly so because of the rise of Hindu nationalism. Here, the author examines a particular era of the history of Punjab to show how multiple currents of nationalism crisscrossed. What we witness in the rise of saffron politics is not recent. It has deep roots.
However, the ideology of Adi Dharma presented a huge challenge to the articulation of Hindu nationalism. According to its ideology, the Hindus are traitors. Its followers believed: “We are the original people of this country, and our religion is Adi Dharma. The Hindu qaum came from outside and enslaved us. When the original sound of the conch was sounded, all the brothers came together -- chamar, chura, sainsi, bhanjre, bhil, all the Untouchables -- to make their problems known. Broth- ers, there are 70 millions of us listed as Hindus, separate us and make us free. We trusted the Hindus, but they turned out to be traitors.”
In part, the crux of the analysis lay in resolving this competing reasoning about who is a Hindu and who is not. The central argument here is that there were several competing visions of nationalism in late 19th and 20th century that were attempting to establish their supremacy over India. There are multiple discourses around these competing notions, and the cultural debates that India saw in the postindependence era were also dictated by this. By engaging with the works of Lajpat Rai, Lal Chand, Bhagat Singh, Mangoo Ram, Swami Shraddanand. Bhai Parmanand and Har Dayal, among others, the author builds a new narrative.
The claim that there was more than one version of nationalism in India during the colonial period is not new. Partition is a consequence of the diversity of nationalism. What is new is that the author clearly identifies four specific versions of nationalism: composite; secular citizenshipbased, religious, and the Depressed classes Vision of the Nation. Composite nationalism saw no contradiction between the emerging community interests and the vision of a composite nation. In the second kind, the main argument was that nationalism was free from communitarian politics. It was argued that communitarian politics is an anathema to the secular nature of nationalism. In the third version, there was an indelible stamp of culture of a specific religious community. Depressed class nationalism looked at Congress nationalism as upper caste nationalism. The author delves into each specific history, looks at the key figures, and arrives at a formulation of his own. The chapters entitled Hindu Nationalism: The Community as Nation and Glimmers of a Dalit Vision of Nationalism are the highlights of this volume. How are these two nationalisms connected? By the late 1940s, two kinds of nationalism were successful: the secular citizenship-based nationalism of India and the sectarian nationalism that led to the formation of Pakistan. To understand Hindu nationalism, we need to make sense of why a separate homeland worked for Muslims, and why such a thing did not even exist for Dalits. Why couldn’t the Dalits even table the debate of a separate homeland? This was because unlike Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who led the separate homeland movement for Muslims, Dalits did not pursue the cause of a separate Dalit homeland as a political project. Jyotibha Phule and Ambedkar with his famous slogan of “Educate, organize, and agitate” contributed significantly in raising consciousness. But what worked for Jinnah was the argument of “geographically contiguous areas”. For Dalits, who mostly lived at the distant tail of most villages, their social base was not located in a geographically-contiguous sense. Thus, there was no possibility of carving out a separate state. Vikas Pathak’s research is crucial for scholars interested in exploring new dimensions of issues like nationalism and communalism.