Left, Right and Centre by Nidhi Razdan

Left, Right and Centre by Nidhi Razdan

Author:Nidhi Razdan [Razdan, Nidhi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386651587
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2017-06-20T00:00:00+00:00


Varshney’s characterization of Hindu and Congress nationalism is exactly right, specially his reference to the nineteenth-century origins of these rival nationalisms. The nationalism on which Gandhi and Nehru built, and which they stewarded into the larger arenas of mass politics, had been constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Congressmen who described themselves as Moderates.

They constructed an unusual nationalism based upon one presiding principle, the representation of diversity. It was a nationalism founded on a scrupulous recognition of India’s heterogeneity, as opposed to the more characteristic nationalist strategy of trumpeting a unifying, homogenous identity.

It isn’t hard to comprehend the reasoning and the historical logic behind self-strengthening movements amongst middle-class groups in late nineteenth-century India. The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Bankim Chandra and the bhadralok are local examples of a widespread Asian response to colonial conquest and encroachment. Pankaj Mishra in From the Ruins of Empire takes us on a historical tour of intellectual responses to Western dominance in the Muslim world, in China, in Japan and in India.

Nor is it difficult to understand the impulse behind the indigenist cultural politics of Tilak, Aurobindo and Pal, Extremists all. They were adapting the homogenizing templates of European nationalism to Indian ends, high on sniffing those potent nationalist glues, religion and language.

Much more challenging (and historically relevant, given that the Moderate construction of Indian nationalism carried the day) is a historical explanation for the anti-majoritarian nationalism confected by Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, M.G. Ranade, Agarkar and Gokhale at the turn of the century. How did the colonial context of the Raj shape this eccentric political platform? What were the framing devices, the rhetorical conceits of this nationalism? How do we characterize it in the vocabulary of modern intellectual history?



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