Competing Nationalisms , livre ebook

RAJSHREE CHANDRA

COMPETING NATIONALISMS
The Sacred and Political Life of Jagat Narain Lal
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Preface
1. The Shaping of Nationalist Consciousness
2. The Fashioning of an Ascetic Nationalist
3. From Hinduism to Hindu Nationalism
4. The Gathering Storm of Anti-Colonial Nationalism
5. The Promise of Civic Nationalism
6. An Inheritance of Contradictions
Footnotes
Preface
1. The Shaping of Nationalist Consciousness
2. The Fashioning of an Ascetic Nationalist
3. From Hinduism to Hindu Nationalism
4. The Gathering Storm of Anti-Colonial Nationalism
5. The Promise of Civic Nationalism
6. An Inheritance of Contradictions
Afterword: Letter to Grandfather
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
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Copyright
Advance Praise for the Book
Rajshree Chandra s fascinating book throws fresh light on the complex journey of Indian nationalism. Its focus is the scholar and freedom-fighter Jagat Narain Lal, a man drawn between the competing, and often conflicting, pulls of faith and politics. Using a wide array of sources, Chandra sensitively narrates the thoughts and struggles of a passionate individual, living through intensely charged times. This richly readable book demonstrates the enormous potential of the biographical genre in illuminating wider historical trends. -Ramachandra Guha, author of Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World
An extraordinary biography of a man who literally personified the tensions between the competing and conflicting strands of Indian nationalism, which are as much in contention today as they were in his time. Chandra brings to her subject the sensibility of the political theorist as she explores Jagat Narain Lal s inner conflicts, and how he negotiated and reconciled the tensions between contrary strands of nationalism in his political life and thought. -Niraja Gopal Jayal, former professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University
A finely written history of a sacrificing patriot, gifted in Sanskrit and Persian, who was enchanted by religion s sacred character but was tempted by its political potential, and who returned to the ethic of equal rights for all in a democratic India. -Rajmohan Gandhi, historian, biographer, research professor at University of Illinois
There is much to savour in Rajshree Chandra s detailed, devoted and diligent biography of her grandfather, Jagat Narain Lal, an important figure in Bihar politics in the early twentieth century. The portrait she paints is not of a giant among men-that would be a cardboard cutout of no interest at all. No, she instead tells the story of an ordinary man who finds he lives in extraordinary times; times that make him grapple with conflicting emotions and wrenching questions in himself.
What is this thing called nationalism ? What does it demand of him every day? How does it colour morality, faith and even sexual desire? It s Lal s lifelong struggle to face these questions head on that make him such a fascinating character, and make this such an unexpectedly compelling book. -Dilip D Souza, columnist; author, The Deoliwallahs
This is an extraordinarily persuasive, rigorous and convincing account, a philosophical portrait and a gripping tale of co-existence of multiple strands of nationalisms in colonial India. Chandra s unusual biography of her grandfather qualifies to be what Stanley Wolpert in his 2010 essay said: biography is the finest form of history . -Mohammad Sajjad, professor of history, Aligarh Muslim University
A fine and highly readable biography that shows that it was individual lives, actions and ideas that made and transformed India s political history. Through the life of her grandfather, Chandra provides novel insights on how the everyday made the exceptional happen in history. This is a fresh history of India s transition to freedom with an intimate view of the North Indian world of society and family. The contention between religious and inclusive nationalism recounted here through the life of Jagat Narain will resonate widely with readers today. -Shruti Kapila, associate professor, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge; author of Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age
To Jaideep
for the constant light
Nationalism is a matter of historical experience. Neither race, nor lineage, nor country has sufficed to mould a people into nation.
Instead of being united by common historical antecedents, the past of the Hindus and Muslims is a past of mutual animosities and destruction, both in the political as well as in the religious fields the prospects might perhaps be different if the past of the two communities can be forgotten by both. Hence, the importance of forgetfulness as a factor in building a nation .
-Jagat Narain Lal
Preface
The stories we once belonged to have been lost. Just as you do not know who we are, where we came from or where we are going, you don t even know which part of the story we fit into, and that is even worse. After passing through so many misadventures and catastrophes, after walking such great distances, it is almost as if we too have forgotten our stories, forgotten who we are.
-Orhan Pamuk 1
About the Book
Most biographies are about men or women who loom large and who have impacted the course of history significantly, if not single-handedly. This one though is a story of a man who was a participant in history, albeit to an extent that he literally embodied and personified it. It would be fair to say that the main protagonist of this story, Jagat Narain Lal, my paternal grandfather, is history in person . He stands as his own evidence of a person continuously engaged with the nationalist context and practice, charting pathways, shaping and being shaped by new possibilities for the self and the nation.
Jagat Narain Lal was, in Pierre Bourdieu s words, a collective individual who cannot be summarized in a single narrative or viewed through a single ideological lens. Each of the political choices he made, pathways he walked, goals he upheld, is a chronicle of the conflicted life of Indian nationalism.
In straddling the many loyalties and multiple affiliations-as a member of the Indian National Congress and of the Hindu Mahasabha; as a Hindu who wanted to combine seva (service), bhakti (devotion) and sangathan (organization) and later upheld virtues of civic nationalism; as a Gandhian and as an ascetic nationalist seeking freedom in a political world-Jagat Babu s life becomes a mirror for the times in which the complex of religiosity, cosmology and ritual could not be isolated from either the political or the social field. As I traced his political journey through varied paths, he appeared almost as an embodiment of the various genres and contradictions of nationalist ideology that competed and vied with each other from the 1920s onwards. Importantly and quite uncannily, Jagat Babu s life also holds a mirror to our times, telling us that perhaps we as a nation are destined to keep revisiting and churning the volatile mix of religion and nationalism. This is what makes his political journey uniquely illuminating, and worthy of historical retrieval.
Jagat Narain Lal was a freedom fighter, a professor of economics at Bihar Vidyapith, a practising lawyer, editor of the journal Mahavir , a member of the Constituent Assembly and of the first Linguistic Re-organization Commission (1948), a writer, a scholar, and also a very religious and spiritual person-his religiosity marking his place to the ideological right within the Congress. He was also a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and was its general secretary in 1926. He had a conflicted relationship with both the Congress and the Mahasabha and, in his own words, he wrestled with many anxieties throughout his political career.
The aim of this book is to reflect upon Jagat Narain Lal s richly conflictual journey and explore the competing strands of nationalism that intersected not just own life, but also the nationalist world that he was a part of, and that we inherited in 1947. In his anxieties and competing political pursuits lay Indian nationalism s own fraught relationship with questions of identity, faith and nationhood. In his vulnerability, suffering, negotiations and truth-telling lies a story of nationalism s own conflicts and contradictions. In Jagat Narain Lal s small story lies a bigger history of competing nationalisms, as well as a tale that speaks to the present. This is in a sense a chronicle of present-day conflicts foretold, as each of the contradictions and anxieties play out with chilling, uncanny familiarity today.
From his life-world there emerges a possibility of detangling a story of nationalism from its overdetermined, over-compacted historical narratives. I may not be able to free the story from what can be called as the gaze of suspicion , but what I will try and do is move away from preoccupations with Is a particular piece of knowledge objective? or How can we know? to further questions of What does the receiving again of knowledge do for us? Can a re-reading of Indian nationalism reveal to us a way of acknowledging our un-negotiated, un-settled, complicated equation between identity and nation-state, and between the sacred and political?
The book travels with Jagat Narain Lal in his journey as a nationalist through four pathways that I characterize as Ascetic, Hindu Nationalist, Anti-Colonial and Civic nationalisms. His life and times give us a glimpse into the intersecting, competing and mutating idioms of nationalism. Illuminated through his journey, these four idioms form the core chapters of the book. How Jagat Babu traversed these multiple pathways gives us a feel of the textural warp and weft of each of the thematic strands. His journey helps us understand the complexities, unities and divergences of four distinct strands that have somewhere along the way got