The illegitimacy of nationalism

Abstract

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

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