Chapter 5

 Benedict Anderson had argued that nations are ‘imagined communities’ given concrete shape
by institutions, such as print capitalism. Since then, writings on nationalism have tried to
examine the distinct ways in which nations have been brought into being in different parts of
the world, and these writings have tried to define what a nation is.
 The tension—of creating the nation while positing its long, unbroken existence—that lies at the
heart of nationalism, makes the study of both nations and nationalisms fascinating, yet difficult.
A second tension underlies the historiography of nationalism
 The idea of nationalism itself has links with two distinct, even opposing, intellectual trends. On
the one hand, it draws upon the heritage of liberalism and secularism and intends to establish a
polity based on self-determination, with no distinction of class, creed or color.

Imperceptible Beginnings
 Till the decade of the 1980s, it was relatively easy for historians to locate the first stirrings of
nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, with a direct link to the foundation of the Indian
National Congress in 1885. The idea that a nation is imagined into existence has ruled out this
easy identification
 Speaking of nationalism as a process, we also need to seriously consider an important and
challenging reminder that Indian nationalism should not be thought of only as a direct result of
colonialism. It ‘solidified’ under colonial rule no doubt, but nationalism drew upon earlier
patterns of social relations, sentiments of attachment to land, loyalties and ‘old patriotisms’
which it recast in the course of getting constituted.
 Defined as regional nationalisms by the master narrative of nationalism, such passions
demonstrated the constant negotiations that nationalism has to undertake in order to establish
itself as the dominant form of identity
 Finally, the categories of the colonizer and the colonized, far from being fixed and self-evident,
were historically constructed and got redefined in accordance with the imperatives of colonial
rule. Any attempt at understanding nationalism, therefore, requires an exploration of the
variegated experiences and processes that shaped the interaction of the colonizer and the
colonized in particular ways and contributed to the growth of nationalistic sentiments
 Clearly, it is impossible to trace the experiences and endeavors of all sections of the population
of a country as vast and varied as India. We will begin with the historic ‘middle class’ widely held
to be the vanguard of nationalism.
 The spread of western education, we are aware, was unequal and uneven. The presidencies of
Calcutta, Bombay and Madras reaped the greatest benefit from higher education after the
opening of universities in 1857.
 The Chitpavan Brahmans and the Parsis monopolized education in the Bombay Presidency,
while in Madras, the Tamil Brahmins— the Iyers and the Iyengers—took the lead.
 Muslim aristocrats kept their distance from the British till the mid-nineteenth century, with the
result that they felt overtaken by their Hindu counterparts.
 The uneven spread of English education was manifest in the way Bengalis dominated public
affairs in the Bengal Presidency to the exclusion of Biharis, Assamese and Oriyas; the Marathi-
 speaking regions of the Bombay Presidency gained greater prominence over the Gujarati-
speaking regions; and Tamil dictated affairs in the south at the cost of Telugu and Malayalam.
 The reformist zeal was driven, to a large extent, by an uncritical acceptance of the colonial
definition of Hindu society as degraded and ‘inferior’. The civilizing discourse of imperial power
produced among Indian intellectuals an active desire to participate in the ‘world-community of
countries’ where ‘peoples and nations’ were graded hierarchically
 Civil society and a public sphere evolved in the early-nineteenth century out of debates on
education, social reform and social improvement. These issues occasioned the formation of
numerous semi-official bodies, such as school-book societies and voluntary associations. They
also led to a proliferation of presses that printed and circulated material related to matters of
‘public interest’
 Bombay, the other metropolis that thrived on trade and commerce, paralleled Calcutta in
organized public activity. Here the shetias who had come together as partners in trading
ventures, increasingly identified with one another as a distinct group despite competition and
rivalry
 This group also emulated their Bengali counterpart in forming a number of voluntary
associations, although the concerns and purposes of such associations were different. Both
Bombay merchants and Bengali intellectuals were members of native school-book societies, and
served on governing boards of schools and colleges.
 In contrast to Bombay, Madras’ distance from the headquarters of the East India Company and
later the Government of India in Calcutta, turned it partly into an ‘administrative backwater’
with the result that the elites of Madras learned to depend on their own resources
 Public activities which started in big cities soon spread to several other towns and provinces all
over India. To give just one example, chiefs, smaller princes, former nobles and landowners in
Poona joined hands in the 1840s to protect their interests—a venture formalized in the
formation of a short-lived public body.

Language, Nation, History

 The passionate public debates over social reform and education not only contributed to the
creation of a public sphere, they contributed to the growth of vernacular literature that included
historical novels, and related efforts to write the history of India by Indians
 In Bengal, Rammohan Roy’s polemical tracts and treaties, written in support of the abolition of
sati, produced a kind of prose Bengali that had not existed in the same form earlier. The person
directly involved in creating a new form of prose Bengali was educator and social reformer Iswar
Chandra Vidyasagar. His mid-century readers and schoolbooks, particularly the primer
Barnaparichay, not only became the template for all other primers; it was the most widely used
primer even in missionary schools
 By the 1870s, the writing and publication of Bengali-language educational material had
‘outstripped those of any other language, including English
 For Marathi intellectuals, history along with other sciences—logic, mathematics, grammar—was
essential for the advancement of mankind. The first half of the nineteenth century had seen
attempts to introduce these sciences in teaching, and new terms in Marathi were coined for
them
  Soon, history and history-writing caught the imagination of the intellectuals and great attention
was paid to developing a ‘native’ historical tradition, which was sadly seen to be lacking in India.
These intellectuals drew inspiration from the English tradition of history-writing and translated
the History of Saxons into Marathi to imbue young students with knowledge of history.
 Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, another Marathi intellectual, agreed that history writing was not
developed in ancient India and that the western intellectual tradition needed to be thanked for
its introduction in India.
 He firmly believed that India’s history could only be written by Indians since an expression of
affinity and closeness with a culture can be properly expressed by a nation’s own people. More
concerned about the emotive and expressive power of history than in its method Chiplunkar
tried to overcome the sense of powerlessness and shame through an affirmation of pride that
could be found in history.
 In order to inculcate this pride in the people, Chiplunkar underlined the need for a ‘complete
history’ of Maharashtra that would reveal the ‘special qualities’ of the Maratha people that had
enabled them to reach ‘glorious heights’ under Shivaji.
 In addition, he advocated the use of a new prose in Marathi based on Sanskrit roots that would
allow intellectuals to absorb English and its concepts without being suffocated by them

Domestic Difference
 The status and condition of ‘women’ figured prominently in liberal and Protestant
characterization of India as ‘inferior’ and ‘rude’. This searing critique made middle-class Indian
men, particularly in Bengal, get into a flurry of activity.
 Partha Chatterjee’s insightful and influential analysis of the nationalist discourse has
demonstrated how the debates and controversy over social reform and the condition of women
enabled Indian men to slowly mark out the inner domain—the interior frontier—of national life
from the outer, the private from the public, the ‘spiritual’ from the ‘material’, re-articulating
them in novel ways.
 Ranajit Guha has made a similar argument in a different way. For him, the nation as a historical
imaginary emerged in the early-nineteenth century, the period of social reform, prior to the
emergence of nationalism as politics
 The analysis of Partha Chatterjee and its critiques agree on the centrality of the Hindu home and
family as the vital inner core of the nation, and the critical place of women within the home and
family.
 All this, together with the actual experience of subjection and the charge of inferiority, produced
contradictory responses among middle-class men. Some, influenced by the ideas of Sri
Ramakrishna, came to despise the subordination and humiliation (dasatya) in the world of
employment, the routine life within the household (sansara)—complicated by the irresistible
call of lust personified in the young wife (kamini)—and felt that renunciation of this mundane
world of everyday-frets would alone permit the attainment of something spiritually higher and
richer.
Rights, Reform, Retribution
 Associations, such as the Landholder’s Society, founded in Calcutta in 1838, with a mix of Indian
and European members and dominated by the landed gentry, gave way to newer ones with
different concerns. The membership and purposes of the Landholder’s Society had been
extremely limited and even though it had a few branches in the hinterland, it had become
defunct by 1840.
 The issue of the renewal of the Company’s charter in the early 1850s provided fresh impetus for
elite mobilization. The British Indian Association set up in Calcutta in 1851 distinguished itself by
its composition and efforts—it was entirely Indian, and attempted to coordinate the work of the
three presidencies in petitions to the British Parliament to effectively voice the demands of
Indian subjects.
 The Indian Councils Act of 1861 signaled the beginning of institutional reforms. Legislative
councils were established at the center and in provinces and this gave British India extended
power to make laws
 While reforms opened up partial but new opportunities of political campaign for educated
Indians, several measures adopted by the colonial government gave them occasion to believe
that their rights were being trampled. The very people who were selected to act as
intermediaries and who felt that such a role was meant for them, increasingly became conscious
of their lack of ‘rights’ and began to rally for them.
 The government’s attempts to impose an income tax in 1860, at a time of famine and scarcity in
India, occasioned indignation and protest from middle-class Indians. Income and property taxes
were imposed to meet the cost of ‘developmental’ activities of municipal boards.

Masculinity, Effeminacy, Consent

 The Ilbert Bill and the controversy it generated are significant for various reasons. One, they
evinced a total polarization of Anglo–Indian and Indian opinion and underscored the extremely
limited nature and reach of liberal promises.
 It is vital to remember, as Mrinalini Sinha argues, that ‘colonial race relations were constantly
rearticulated in response to material conditions
 In Sinha’s view, the ‘babu’, an old Bengali word of Persian origin, did not carry any pejorative
connotation in British usage till the mid-nineteenth century. It was used as a title of respect for
men like the English Mr. Indeed, the early negative connotations of the ‘babu’ were to be found
in Bengali satires, which commented on and ridiculed the nouveau riche culture of Calcutta
which had imitated and adopted Persianized and later Anglicized lifestyles to climb up the social
and economic ladder
 Thomas Babington Macaulay was the first to clearly relate the ‘feebleness’ of Bengalis to their
loss of independence and to their dubious moral character (Macaulay 1900). James Mill was
equally eloquent. Comparing the Hindus to the ‘half-civilized’ ancestors of the British, he
commented that the ‘manliness and courage of our ancestors’ was certainly superior to ‘the
slavish and dastardly spirit of the Hindus’.
 Middle-class Indian men, for their part, took this charge of effeminacy very seriously since a
combination of factors made it real for them. Limited economic opportunities and curtailed
‘rights’ circumscribed their attempts at leadership.
  Responses to the charge of effeminacy varied in different parts of India according to the
hierarchy of ‘effeminacy’ created by the colonizers. In the last chapter, we discussed how the
censuses marked out the ‘martial races’ and gave them special opportunities in the British–
Indian army.

The First National Organization

 Processes in the 1870s and early 1880s, we have seen, had conferred a new dynamism on the
emerging nationalist consciousness among the educated middle classes. Centralizing policies of
the colonial state and infrastructural technology made possible ‘emergent territorially grounded
conceptions of a national economy, culture, and identity’
 The Indian National Congress was formed at a national convention held in Bombay in December
1885. The circular sent out in March 1885 to inform political workers of the coming Congress
session affirmed that the Congress intended ‘to enable all the most earnest laborers in the
cause of national progress to become personally known to each other
 Despite such professed aims, the Congress suffered from a number of limitations, the major one
related to its composition. Early Congress was primarily composed of urban elites, professionals
and some landed gentry, who were high-caste Hindus
 The three towns of Punjab sent a representative each, and the four principal towns of the
North-Western Provinces and Awadh sent seven members. The disparity in representation and
social composition had serious repercussions on the program and performance of the Congress.
Needless to say, freedom from colonial rule was nowhere on the agenda

‘Moderate’ Nationalism
 The enthusiasm to establish an all-India association did not mean that it was radical in its aims
and programme. This is not surprising in view of the composition of the Congress.
 The very recent work of Mrinalini Sinha suggests that till the early decades of the twentieth
century, middle-class Indian ideas of rights and belonging were informed by the notion of British
subject hood. This sense of belonging to the empire, of being an imperial citizen—a direct
extension of the promises of the Queen’s Proclamation—would make ‘freedom’ from British
rule seem incongruous
 Undoubtedly, the early career of the Congress was ‘moderate’ because of the demands it raised
and the means it adopted to voice such demands
 The speeches made at the second session of the Congress held in Calcutta between 27 and 30
December 1886 are representative of this critique, which was launched from various angles.
While for Raja Rampal Singh, the damage the British government had done was to degrade the
nature of Indians by ‘systematically cutting out of us all martial spirit’ thereby ‘converting a race
of soldiers and heroes into a timid flock of quill-driving sheep’.
 Nationalists made use of the analytical and normative categories of a specifically national
developmentalist model to ground their critique of colonial rule and classical political economy
Subaltern Nationalism
 So far we have explored the worlds of the Indian elites, the beneficiaries of colonial rule,
traditionally associated with the growth of nationalist consciousness. We will now enter the
worlds of peasants and ‘tribals’ and other members of rural society, affected differently but
adversely by colonialism
 The key role of religion in tribal and peasant movements has meant that for a long time they
were dismissed as non-political, millenarian upsurge with no conscious objective or programme
 With capitalist development in agriculture remaining incipient and weak throughout this period,
the most substantial income from property in land was provided by rent. The relationship
between landlords and a variety of agricultural producers, such as tenant-cultivators, share-
croppers and agricultural labourers, was defined by the extraction of the peasant’s surplus by
modes that were often extra-economic, such as the landlord’s standing in the local society and
in the colonial polity
 The work of the subaltern studies collective extended this incisive analysis to systematically
recover the ‘politics of the people’ and highlight the presence of an autonomous domain of
politics, a domain ‘that neither originated from elite politics’ nor depended on it for its existence
 With this discussion in view, we now examine some representative instances of peasant and
tribal insurgency. We have analysed some in the earlier chapters, but here we will discuss a few
more in order to appreciate their politics and trace their implications for nationalism.
 Processes that preceded the Deccan Riots showed that the peasants had a clear grasp of the
impact of British land revenue policies. The decision of the Bombay government to increase land
revenue demand in 1867, at a time when the peasants were in great distress, had met with stiff
opposition.
 A revolt of a different order, which had also earned middle-class empathy and support, was the
Indigo Revolt of 1859–60 in Bengal. The importance of indigo, developed as a cash crop by
British planters with encouragement from the Company’s government from the end of the
eighteenth century, was on the decline by the 1850s.

Promising Futures
 The most brutal, direct and disruptive forms of colonial violence were perhaps unleashed in the
‘tribal’ areas. We have noted the colonial marking of frontiers between the plains and the forest
people that forced the ‘forest people’ to stick to a defined terrain and occupation.
 The establishment of a forest department in 1864 followed by the passing of the Forests Act in
1865, severely curtailed the customary rights of tribal peasants and opened up the forests for
commercial use.
 Efforts to cope with this massive disruption consisted in small acts of resistance and subversion
and violent outbursts, which together made the woods ‘unquiet’.
 The son of a share-cropper, Birsa had received some education from the missionaries and had
subsequently come under Vaishnava influence. During 1894–95, he participated in a movement
to stop the acquisition of village wastelands by the forest department.
  The uprising was brutally suppressed by government forces and Birsa and several others were
caught and jailed. The revolt, however, caused the colonial government to enquire into the
causes, and this eventually gave the Mundas a degree of legal protection with regard to their
land rights.
 In India, nationalism remained a contested terrain both in its imagination and in its articulation. If
middle-class imaginings went beyond modular forms of nationalism derived from the west
illustrating the force of imagination.