From Plassey to Partition – A History of Modern Indian by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-03-14T07:39:58+00:00

206 FROM PLASSEYTO PARTITION

intellectual agency to the people of Asia in shaping their own history, has recently come under criticism from a wide variety of ideological positions. Partha Chatterjee, for example, has argued that if the West defined subjectivity and prescribed our predicament, and also imagined for us the forms of our resistance to colonial regimes, then what was really left for us to imagine? He argues therefore that long before the political struggle for power began, the Indian society was imagining its nation in a private cultural sphere, even though the state was in the hands of the colonisers. It was here that they imagined their own domain of sovereignty and constructed an Indian modernity that was modern but not Western.s1 It was from here, i.e., from this cultural construction of a space for autonomy in the early nineteenth century, that Indian nationalism started its career.

CA. Bayly, on the other hand, has traced the roots of Indian nationalism to its pre-colonial days; it emanated from what he describes as "traditional patriotism", which was "a socially active sentiment of attachment to land, language and cult" that developed in the subcontinent long before the process of Westernisation (read modernisation) had begun.59 In India of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such sentiments were emerging on a regional basis as homeland was being defined by various terms like desh, uatan or nadu, where identities were gradually taking shape with the development of regional languages and religious affiliations. But although regionally centred at Bengal, Maharashtra, Awadh or Mysore, their isolation broke down through various means of communication. The political legitimacy of the Mughal empire was recognised throughout Hindustan, which was thought to be the abode of both Hindus and Muslims; and cultural barriers melted down through commercialisation and regular pilgrimages. As the East India Company established its hegemony, Bayly argues, this traditional patriotism manifested itself through various indigenous critiques of foreign rule deviating from the established ethical traditions of good government and through irate reactions to Christian missionary propaganda. Finally, it burst forth through numerous acts of resistance, participated by both the princes and the commoners, culminating in the revolt of 1857. After the revolt, a modem sector of politics gradually evolved in India, through rapid spread of education, development of communication systems, such as the railways and telegraph, and the emergence of a new public space created by the colonial institutions. Although "old patriotism" did not completely die out during this period, it was significantly reworked

EMERGENCE OF INDIAN NATIONALISM

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and reshaped-if at this point we may go back to Chatterj ee-to create a new colonial modernity that was different from that of the West We may trace here very briefly the initial phase of that complex and ongoing transformatory process that tried to fuse together, not always seamlessly though, all theose regional, local and fragmentary identities into a modem 'nation'.

The political history of India in the post-1857 period-when the political contest with the colonial regime began at a more modem institutionalised public space- is multifaceted.

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