by VIJAY PRASHAD
The book both stimulates and obfuscates a discussion on Indian nationalism.
Kyun bhai Nihala, Azaadi tu hai dekhi.
Na bhai Prava, ne kha de ne vekhi.
Main Jaggu ti sunni assi
Ambala ti aaye si.
Listen Brother Nihal, have you seen Freedom?
No Brother Prava, I haven’t seen it nor eaten it.
I heard from Jaggu
It has come up to Ambala.
—Gurramdas ‘Alam’, A zaadi, 1946.
…
[Perry] Anderson, former editor of New Left Review and a leading Marxist intellectual, has been doing a series of essays in London Review of Books on some of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) states—with Brazil and India in the lead. These three essays appeared in LRB, where they provoked a great deal of reaction. The essays suggest that there is a serious flaw within Indian nationalism that dooms India’s prospects for its ambitions to become a great power. His is a very strong denunciation of the capitulations of the Congress to the hierarchies of the past, and of the new republic to the vested interests of money and religion. There is much in the book that will be familiar to readers of Indian history and to those who keep up with the news, which is what characterised some of the discomfort in the letters page of LRB. But that is not the heart of the problem. To my mind, this book both stimulates discussion and obfuscates it—it leads us to a serious consideration of some of the shibboleths of Indian nationalism but simultaneously it reduces nationalism to Gandhi, leaves out the major contests within that horizon and fails to recognise its vitality that has only now seemed to run its course. Indian nationalism was not stillborn. It had a very good run, but now finds itself on life support.
Who are these intellectuals to whom Anderson addresses his book? Anderson names the titles of their main books early in his text and submits their names to a footnote: Meghnad Desai, Ramachandra Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Amartya Sen and Sunil Khilnani. They are, for Anderson, the voices of Indian ideology, the liberalism that is the self-representation of the mainstream of India’s ruling class. Anderson does not do a close reading of these texts, leaving us to take on faith that his characterisation of these writers fits the bill. Their nationalism, he writes, is hampered by the changed context. Where there was a national liberation struggle against colonialism, nationalism allowed all shades of opinion to gather in unity. Even those indifferent to socialism or secularism held fast to the national staff. When colonialism ended, nationalism ceased to allow these elements a progressive posture; their nationalism now simply allowed them to ignore or to dismiss internal problems of religious, caste and patriarchal chauvinism.
A nationalism that does not see its internal limitations, Anderson notes, “becomes a discourse that fatally generates a culture of euphemism and embellishment, precluding any clear-eyed stock-taking of past or present”. The worst of the lot are the hardened conservatives, although they use the nationalism of the liberals as their shield against criticism. This dominant Indian Ideology is governed by a vacuous celebration of democracy. It hopes against hope that the process of democracy within the current configuration of Indian state institutions will somehow overturn the hierarchies of faith and fortune. That is Anderson’s main claim.
…
The Left
One reason that Anderson’s book appears a little anaemic is that it lacks an engagement with the entire tradition of the Left, which he says at the start is a “major lacuna” in his book. Had Anderson engaged with the writings of the Left he would have to concede an important point, that Indian nationalism was far richer than Gandhi’s contribution and Gandhi was not as sacrosanct as Anderson makes him out to be. Marxist writings such as R.P. Dutt’s India Today (1940), D.D. Kosambi’s An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) and Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India (1983) defined the intellectual assessment of the national movement, with the Congress’ official history, P. Sitaramayya’s The History of the Indian National Congress (1935) and Nehru’s own The Discovery of India (1946) unable to control the narrative. It was the Marxist method that was the foundation of the work of these writers, and it was their keen eye to the social worlds of the working class that allowed them to break from the hegemony of the Congress. Dutt came out of the communist tradition, where there was no hesitancy in offering a full critique of Gandhi (communist leader S.A. Dange’s 1921 book is called Gandhi v. Lenin, with the winner obvious).
Dutt’s assessment of Gandhi was spirited: “Gandhi is recognised as a higher plane of spiritual reasoning: the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the door to the hearts of the masses where the moderate bourgeois could not hope for a hearing—and the best guarantee of the shipwreck of any mass movement which had the blessing of his association.” These words were written within the fabric of Indian nationalism, contesting Gandhi’s claim to the whole cloth.
It was this approach that characterised the communist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s books The Mahatma and the Ism (1958) and A History of the Indian Freedom Struggle (1977) as sharply critical as Dutt but with a more generous attitude towards the culture of struggle and sacrifice that was engendered by the mass campaigns of the 1920s. Namboodiripad’s main line of attack against Gandhi was that the Congress leader feared independent peasant action: “Once they were drawn into the movement, this new class, the peasantry, drew up its own forms of struggle, and its own form of organisation.” Indeed, this is what EMS and his comrades created in the Kisan Sabha (1936).
Frontline for more