Indian nationalism

For generations of British soldiers and administrators, India's North-West Frontier with Afghanistan constituted an imperial obsession. A combination of fears about the local Pashtun population and external invasion from Afghanistan and Russia convinced the rulers of British India that the region was the one place in the empire where Britain could suffer a 'knock-out blow.' In this cultural and political study, Brandon Marsh examines the power and influence of this belief on the Afghan frontier, India as a whole, and British imperialism between 1918 and 1948. This book explores British attempts to isolate the frontier after the First World War, the relationship between colonial nationalism and state sanctioned violence in the region, and the significant connection between British perceptions about the Afghan frontier and the collapse of the British Raj in India.

Despite the availability of historical evidence and a whole lot of discursive arguments, a number of Euro-centric scholars have denied India's fundamental claim and status as a nation. However, during the period of the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth century, a time when there was a revival of the country’s nationalistic spirit, the writers and philosophers made notable attempts towards understanding and analysing the nationhood of this country, a country that boasted of its ancient and glorious past. In the same vein, Bankim Chandra’s novel "Anandamath" makes a significant attempt to depict the loss of identity that the India had been suffering from, and redefines the concept of nation and nationalism, a movement for asserting their self-pride which was in the offing simultaneously in other parts of the world. The present paper examines the role of Anandamath in determining a positive concept of nationalism.

Monsoon, the new translation of Vimala Devi’s Monção (1963), offers contemporary readers a rare peek into Goa as it appeared to a certain progressive Catholic elite on the eve of the Indian annexation of the territory from Portugal. This introduction offers a better understanding of this group enabling the reader to gauge how much the political terrain has shifted, in Goa and the wider subcontinent, and to assess the political positions that made sense to progressive Catholics in this period.

COMMEMORATING 78TH ANNIVERSARY OF QUIT INDIA MOVEMENT
DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE OF THE BETRAYAL OF QUIT INDIA MOVEMENT 1942 BY SAVARKAR, SYAMA PRASAD MUKHERJEE & RSS

On the eve of 78th anniversary of the glorious Quit India Movement [QIM] we must evaluate the role of the Hindutva gang in India's anti-colonial freedom struggle. QIM also known as ‘August Kranti' (August Revolution) was a nation-wide Civil Disobedience Movement for which a call was given on August 7, 1942 by the Bombay session of the All-India Congress Committee. It was to begin on August 9 as per Gandhi's call to 'Do or Die' in his Quit India speech delivered in Mumbai at the Gowalia Tank Maidan on August 8. Since then August 9 is celebrated as August Kranti Divas.
The British swiftly responded with mass detentions on August 8th itself. Over 100,000 arrests were made which included the total top leadership of Congress including Gandhi, mass fines were levied and demonstrators were subjected to public flogging. Hundreds of civilians were killed in violence, many shot by the police and army. Many national leaders went underground and continued their struggle by broadcasting messages over clandestine radio stations, distributing pamphlets and establishing parallel governments. Innumerable patriotic Indians were shot dead for the crime that they were holding Tricolour publically. Even before that a terrible massacre took place in Mysore where the armed forces of Mysore Raja who was very close to Hindu Mahasabha and RSS shot dead 22 Congress activists for saluting Tricolour.
It is to be noted that after declaring Congress an anti-national and unlawful organization, the British masters allowed only Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League to function.
Most of us know that the then Communist Party of India opposed the QIM thus betraying a great phase of mass upsurge in the history of the freedom struggle. But it is well documented that despite CPI’s call for keeping aloof from QIM large number of Communist activists participated in it. Moreover, CPI later offered unconditional apology for opposing it. However, what role the then Hindutva camp—consisting of the Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh —played in the QIM is under wraps for reasons unknown. The Hindutva camp not only opposed QIM but also provided multi-faceted and multi-dimensional support to the British rulers in suppressing this historic mass upsurge. In this connection, shocking documents are available; these should be read to be believed.

Examining a classic formulation of the relationship between colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms in postcolonial theory, as well as its recent critiques, this article puts forward a thesis that contemporary colonialisms and imperialisms may be best diagnosed through the lens of identifying forms of sovereignty rather than relying on the geopolitical framework of West/non-West recognizable in the conceptual vocabulary of postcolonial theory. Focusing on the disputed issue of Indian sovereignty over Kashmir, this essay asks the following questions: What forms of occupation by postcolonial nation-states remain concealed by ways in which extant postcolonial approaches assume geopolitical divisions? Why is it necessary to rethink the parameters of imperialism and colonialism for a contemporary era?

This article deals with now a day’s  political questions in Indian Polity as fundamentalism is encroaching the spear of day to day life of Indian citizens. Citizenship, Migration and identity crisis seen in Indian Polity is making us to think again on basic foundations of various aspects of Political terminology used in Indian Politics in general. Basically Nation-State concept which evolved in modern era in European Continent has different aspirations among the peoples of those countries. In Indian scenario we find is very hard to elaborate the Nation State concept as a whole comparatively. In this article all the details of nation state concept have been taken in considerations. In a nutshell we can say that Indian Nationalism has great legacy since ancient era. In modern times this will survive and even contribute to world community at large.

FROM THE PREFACE:
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) claims to be the greatest embodiment of nationalism in the country today. There has been a concerted attempt to market it as being synonymous with patriotism in India. It is also a fact, though, that the claims of the RSS in this regard have always been challenged by individuals and organizations who were in the thick of Freedom Movement. There is no dearth of writings exposing the negative role of the RSS during the Freedom Struggle. However, this booklet is an attempt to collect facts of the Freedom Movement era from the archives of the RSS itself. It has been the intention of the author that the documents of the RSS should speak for themselves. This booklet is surely going to disappoint those who believe that the RSS played any role in the Freedom Movement. They will hear from the horse’s mouth that not only was a silence maintained about the evils of foreign rule but all attempts were made to sabotage the united fight against British colonial rule.
This booklet contains a thematic index of references in speeches and writings of the RSS leaders to participation in the Freedom Movement. It is published as an appendix.
Translations from original Hindi texts quoted in the booklet are by the author.
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131st Birth anniversary of Frontier Gandhi
Is Forgetting Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan that Easy?
February 6 is the 131st birth anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan also popularly known as Frontier Gandhi and Badshah Khan. He was a prominent Indian freedom fighter, a die-hard opponent of the two-nation theory and the idea of Pakistan. He was totally committed to Gandhi's idea of non-violence, enjoyed the same stature in the NWFP also known as Frontier as Gandhi had in India. He opposed with full conviction the inclusion of NWFP in Pakistan but failed. After formation of Pakistan he, his followers and family faced terrible repression at the hands of the consecutive Pakistan governments including the one led by Jinnah and Islam-o-fascists. One of his brothers was assassinated, his supporters butchered by the Islamist fascists, he spent more than a decade in Pakistani jails and was forced to go into exile in Afghanistan. He was declared to be an agent of Hindu India. ML government led by Jinnah did not tolerate the NWFP government led by Badshah Khan's elder brother and it was dismissed on August 22, 1947; exactly 8 days after the formation of Pakistan.
Whatever ruling classes of Pakistan did to Frontier Gandhi is understandable as he stood as a rock against Islamist politics of declaring Muslims as a separate nation. But what treatment he got and is receiving in India is far more abhorring.
The latest denigration of his took place in last December in India. A hospital constructing in his honour in Faridabad (Haryana) with the help of Hindu-Sikhs who migrated from NWFP, inaugurated by the first PM of India, Jawaharlal Nehru as Badshah Khan Hospital was renamed as Atal Bihari Vajpayee hospital! 
Frontier Gandhi founded the Khudai Khidmatgars (Servants of God) which was at the head of a patriotic and socially progressive movement. The movement was also nicknamed as ‘The Red Shirts’ due to the colour of uniform it used for its cadres. Their presence was first noticed at the Lahore Congress in 1929 which at that time according to police reports numbered 200,000. Quotation from the Quran against slavery served as rallying points for nationalist enthusiasm and the struggle to liberate the country from foreign rule became the Holy War of Khudai Khidmatgars.  A peerless authority on Muslims and Muslim politics in modern India, Wilfred Cantwell Smith was of the opinion that "No section of India has been more thoroughly nationalist.”

Under the governance of Viceroy Lord Curzon the harmony of the subcontinent was stirred up vigorously which shook the roots of the British colonial empire in the Indian subcontinent. The first division of Bengal, its background, impact and legacy are all covered under a lot of debates and controversies. However, one critical implication this division had was on the development of nationalistic emotions among the population, which later on propelled the independence movement for India. This development of Indian nationalism is the outcome of the combined effort of a number of factors, and a significant part was played by political stalwarts who rose up against the policies of the British administration in India and incited the common population to agitate against the foreign oppressors.
This paper shall attempt to understand how the political thinkers of the movement used the newspapers to spread and materialise their cause of ‘preaching the new creed of radical nationalism.’ The central focus of the thesis would be on the role played by the English 6 newspapers based out in Calcutta during the Swadeshi period in ensuring that the progression of the movement saw a rise of nationalistic emotions among the local population. The research will seek to analyse the factors that propelled the newspapers to change the focus of their reporting. It will also evaluate the circumstances that led the newspapers to take an active role in the movement. It seeks to understand the extent to which they were successful in influencing the minds of the population the British Indian provinces. Finally, it will look into the role they played in the evolution of the movement.

19世纪末，孟加拉知识分子以本土萨克蒂信仰为基础，首次将“印度母亲”构建为一个具有民族主义色彩的政治隐喻。20世纪上半叶，世俗民族主义和印度教民族主义两股力量在独立运动的进程中逐渐分化，双方均将“印度母亲”再现为符合自身意识形态的有限的民族主义想象，并通过围绕这一概念开展的一系列意义生产、视觉表达和话语实践，将抽象的民族主义理念转化为可以被民众感知、认同的对象。甘地和尼赫鲁对“印度母亲”的构想具有“去神祇化”的世俗主义倾向，前者以多元宗教的平等共存为核心，后者以广大无产阶级的觉醒进步为标志。相反，以团家族为首的印度教民族主义者强调“印度母亲”作为“印度教特性”化身的神圣性以及作为“印度教徒”母亲的专属性，他们利用图像、建庙、朝圣、口号等手段，不断释放“印度母亲”在强化“印度教徒”文化凝聚力和民族认同方面的潜能。莫迪执政以来，印度教民族主义强势发展，团家族通过策略性地运用“印度母亲必胜”这一口号，在穆斯林“他者”中进一步划分敌友，扩大自身势力，同时对国大党世俗民族主义的传统话语空间造成挤压。本文考察“印度母亲”在不同历史阶段及不同政治语境下的多元构想和表述，旨在从一个文化与政治相结合的视角，增进对印度民族主义演进过程及当代走向的认识。In the late 19th century, intellectuals of Bengal made the first attempt to formulate “Bharat Mata” into a nationalist political metaphor on the basis of Shaktism. As secular nationalism and Hindu nationalism increasingly went on separate ways amid the independent movement of the first half of the 20th century, both forces represented “Bharat Mata” as limited nationalist imagination in accordance with their specific ideologies. Through a series of meaning productions, visual articulations and discursive practices centering on this concept, they transformed the abstract idea of nationalism into a tangible object that common people could perceive and identify with. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru conceived of “Bharat Mata” with a distinct secular tendency to “de-deify” this figure: While Gandhi’s conception focused on equal coexistence of multiple religions, Nehru’s was marked by a valorization of the awakening and progress of the proletariat. In contrast, Hindu nationalists headed by the Sangh Parivar emphasized the sacred status of “Bharat Mata” as the avatar of “Hindutva” and its exclusiveness as the mother of all “Hindus”. They constantly released the potentials of “Bharat Mata” to enhance the cultural cohesion and national identification among “Hindus” by means of image, temple, yatra and slogan. The years since Modi came to power saw the mighty resurgence of Hindu nationalism. Thanks to its strategic use of the slogan “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, the Sangh Parivar has increased its power and influence by creating new demarcations between enemy and friend among the Muslim “Other”, and has also posed substantial pressures on the Congress’s conventional discursive space of secular nationalism. This paper examines the complex configurations and articulations of “Bharat Mata” in different historical conjunctures and political contexts. It aims to deepen our understanding of the evolutionary processes and current dynamics of nationalism in India from a perspective that holds culture and politics together.

regiments were mixed. Promotion of Indians to commissioned posts varied in the two types of regiments; in class regiments, promotion was based on a general seniority list encompassing all companies, but in class company regiments, promotion was made from the rolls of the particular class in which a vacancy occurred. No Indian officer of one class was allowed to command troops of another; this guaranteed that the link between a sepoy and his British commander would be an Indian commissioned officer of the same class as the sepoy was.

The first Partition of Bengal (1905), with an ulterior motive to disunite the Bengalis, was finally annulled in 1911. Was it an illustration of British fair play and justice or was it the beginning of a process of retreat in the face of anti-imperialist struggle? A close scrutiny of the changes that took place in British politics and Indian nationalist movement from 1905 to1911 provides an
important clue in the analysis of the move. This paper is an attempt to understand why the British ultimately unsettled what they had flatly declared to be a settled fact.

With its use of the English proscenium and theatre architecture, elaborate stage sets and costumes, song, dance and spectacle, Parsi theatre became extremely popular with the newly nascent Indian theatre-going public soon after it was founded in Bombay in the mid-19thcentury. Beginning with adaptations of Shakespeare, the works of Sheridan and other writers of the ‘Comedy of Manners’, Parsi theatre soon moved into the arena of writing and adapting for the stage stories from Persian mythology and from the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, before moving into what came to be known as ‘romantic social drama’. This paper will focus on the period towards the end of the nineteenth century when both women and female impersonators competed for precedence over the Parsi stage and then early Indian cinema. It explores the ways in which female impersonators were held up as performing the ideal and ‘acceptable’ form of femininity, providing a template for that pristine paragon of virtue: the modern ‘Indian’ woman. It also investigates the labour involved in the stylisation of idealised notions of femininity as performed by young male actors and how these shaped the young men’s everyday gendered and sexual lives as they were compelled to spend their youth and young manhood in borrowed garb. The significance of the chapter lies in its capacity to highlight the instability of sex and gender as a carefully crafted and regulated stylisation and not a ‘natural expression’ of a fixed interior essence. Idealised heterosexual femininity in India is demonstrated as an ironic construction as it emerges primarily through the scripted behaviours and appearance of young male actors.

The Left movement in India began originally in Russia, heavily influenced by international politics. It's a movement not very clearly understood by the Indian masses, which has evolved into many shades. The Left movement kicked off with various Socialist and Communist Parties being formed, and also getting a lot of patronage within the Congress. In my paper, I hope to discuss the evolution of the Left movement, which majorly transforms into a discussion on the Communist Party of India giving a brief history and moving on the post‐Independence period. The main objective of this paper is to understand the movement in context of India, it's influence and how in current days of turmoil it has become a contested ideology, all the while emphasising that like all other ideologies, we need to recognize and accept the fact that the Left isn't of one particular shade. During the 1920s, the National Movement was in full swing in India and had viewed the rise of various streams and methods for the fight. This was the age of Gandhian politics, and the rise of the educated youth giving unprecedented support to the freedom struggle. Due to the unrest among some classes about the inaction of the Moderates, revolutionary terrorism sprouted up in various parts of the country, with the cult of the bomb under the leadership 1 of Lokmanya Tilak and his colleagues ‐ Lala Lajpat Rai and Bakin Chandra, the trio being popularly called as 'Lal‐Pal‐Bal'. This led to the beginning of an alternative method of struggle contributing to the radicalization of the national movement. Add to this, the impact of the Russian revolution which drove the lesson that if common people ‐ the workers, peasants and the intelligentsia could overthrow the might Czarist empire, and establish a socialist state with no exploitation of human beings, the same could be replicated by the Indians. Socialist doctrines became extremely popular with the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx being released in English and Malayalam almost simultaneously and spreading to further regions. Print media contributed further to the cause with various Socialist weeklys being published. Certain fractions of the populations, dissatisfied with the Gandhian policies were more attracted to the same. A lot of youth associations were formed in Bengal, Punjab and to a certain extent, other princely states. Similar groups were formed by Indians living abroad. These groups started planning the liberation of India from abroad with the help of countries hostile towards the British. An example of this was the Ghadar Party formed in US in 1913. The Russian Communist Party, its leaders, Lenin and the Communist International paid a great deal of attention of the revolutionary emigres on their soil. While the emigres had committed themselves to the idea of Communism, many of them didn't understand the concept clearly.

Rukmini Devi was a key figure in the revival of Indian dance in the early independence era. Her innovations pertained to both solo and dance-drama forms. The paper deals with analysis of two important scenes of her Ramayana production-Sabari moksham which show her choreographic strategies and reflect her style with regard to dance drama.It reflects how she worked with aesthetic consciousness of her times during the nationalist struggle of the 1930s and 40s. Analysis has used terminology as in Abhinayadarpana which is used as the textual reference for Bharatanatyam. The paper finds how dimensions of choreography with regard to stage aesthetics, costuming of characters, intonation of sollu, character and context-oriented use of nritta and angika abhinaya broadened the scope of collective performance in her works.

When Donald Trump imposed the " Muslim ban " what was surprising was the absence of any pretense to make it political. It wasn't a ban against some countries, it was a ban against Muslim countries or pithily against Muslims. But then what happens when the fear of intrusion underlying " banning " finds its realization in lynching? In the existing discourse on Islamophobia, how do we understand not only the Muslim who isn't allowed to enter but also the Muslim who is quite simply killed for having entered ages ago. In this paper, I share the trajectory of Muslims in India through history, politics, and psychoanalytic theory to present the case of Islamophobia in India.

This article considers the narrative and context around a particularly well-publicized incident of rejuvenation therapy, advertised as kāyakalpa (body transformation or rejuvenation), from 1938. In this year, the prominent Congress Activist and co-founder of Banaras Hindu University, Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), underwent an extreme – and very public – rejuvenation treatment under the care of a sadhu using the name of Shriman Tapasviji (c.1770?-1955). The article will explore the presentation of Malaviya’s treatment and how it inspired a focus on rejuvenation therapy within Indian medicine in the years immediately following. Exploring this mid-twentieth century incident highlight some of the themes and concerns of the historical period, just out of living memory, but in many ways similar to our own.

Drain of wealth in simple terms refers to the outflow of primarily money in various forms from the country to the colonizing country. Drain of wealth in India's case started in the 18th century continuing well until the British left in 1947. Various studies have been devoted to the subject, studying the kinds of drain, it's impact, how the economy recovered, its social and political connotations. In the age of subaltern study, we don't only look for empirical studies though facts are of utmost importance to build our case, however it's the link to social and cultural politics which interests us more and is helpful in getting a picture of the impact of Drain of wealth during that period. The issue was actually raised by conservative British politician ​ Edmund Burke​ who in the 1780s vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that ​ Warren Hastings​ and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray (1998) continues this line of reasoning, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of plunder and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India. (Economic Drain Theory) Ray believes that British depleted the food and money stocks and imposed high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal. It was Dadabhai Naoroji, the grand man of India, who came up with economic nationalism. The Swadeshi Movement in 1905 was completely based on his findings of the impact of economic exploitation of India, as stated by Asim K Karmakar. In his book, Poverty, he calculated the net national income of the country and the consequent impact of colonization on the people and the country. Backed with a strong grasp on economics and an understanding of the ground reality. Naoroji categorized drain into two types; in the form of remittances from European officials who were permitted to send a part of their income back home and remittances by non official Europeans who were not paid salaries but made immense profits on plantations, agents, etc. In 1873, he wrote that this drain prevents India from making any capital. It's only the British who have any savings and they bring it back to the country and re­invest it. This basically means dual profits for the British. It also points to the monopoly the British had made for themselves. Another impact of the drain was the breakdown on traditional Indian industries as Indians didn't have any money to invest and the Europeans didn't invest in Indian industries. This leads to a whole nexus of exclusive exploitation of the Indian economy and people. Naoroji described this as vampirism, with blood being a metaphor for food, and his essential meaning was that the British were sucking out the blood from the Indian economy, and consequently it's people. Naoroji also talked about regional disparity within India and the internal economic drain.

The mutinies that took place on 10th of May, 1857 in Meerut and their marched to Delhi on 11th May and very soon the spread of the mutinies in Kanpur, Locnow, Jhansi etc. have been called as “Sepoy Mutiny” by the colonial official and British colonial historians. But after a few decades of the revolt, perception of the historian like John. W. Kaye was different in nature. An remarkable turning point came out on the notion of the revolt in 1909 when V.D. Savarkar published his work and defined it as the Indian War of Independence. While the celebration of 100th anniversary of revolt has brought a large number of researches and books on the topic by Joshi, Chaudhary and Sen ect. where they saw the revolt of 1857 into a new perspectives. Then the new kinds of historiographies ermerged by Mukherjee and Stokes in the late 20th century and works of Dalrymple, Yadav and Rajendran in early decades of 21st century presented the historyof the revolt in the very new perspectives that had been never written by the early historians. In his article, i will highlight the issues and concept of historiography that had been done both in the colonial India and independent India.

Both Bankimchandra and Vivekananda belonged to the bhadralok class, in other words, babu, with their attitudes, assumptions, and aspirations.  Both were quintessential Bengalis, whose nationalist consciousness never comprehended the complexities  and diversities of India at large.  Their patriotism was informed, or limited, by their class and ethnic consciousness, though they often used the rhetoric of universalism, cosmopolitanism and Indian nationalism. Most important, their secular nationalist consciousness found expansion by transforming itself into religious consciouasness, that is, religious nationalism.  Both Bankimchandra and Vivekananda demonstrated a remarkable penchant for the dramatic and the sensational to make their point and their triumphant rhetoric together with the former's stupendous scholarship and the latter's tremendous personal charm made them phenomenally popular and invested their logia and writings with the mystique of two colonial figures of titanic proportions.

The word yoga refers to a multifaceted array of beliefs and practices. Yoga is twinned with sāṃkhya as one of the six orthodox darshanas (worldviews) of Hindu philosophy, with Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra having been codified by around the 5th century of the Common Era. A distinct body of texts known as the haṭhayoga corpus appears around the 11th century and emphasizes physical practices most likely used by ascetic communities. The ultimate aim of yoga is described by various words (e.g., kaivalya, samādhi, mokṣa, etc.); it is often described as an experience of an individual soul’s uniting with the divine, and/or becoming liberated from the material world. These historical precedents have continuities with contemporary yoga practices, and for many Indians today, yoga is understood as the essence of Indian spirituality.Yoga, however, took on new meanings in the late colonial period, becoming a mental, physical, and ethical discipline to aid in the struggle for an independent Indian natio...

This article positions the women’s question in terms of performance within the larger ongoing nationalist concern and freedom movement in the early part of the 20th century. It reads Rabindranath Tagore’s experiments in his dance drama as embodying a postcolonial aesthetic, not always in harmony with the nationalist ideals churned out at the time, often jostling with contending notions about art, femininity and sexuality.

“Very timely because Hindutva remains a potent threat to the Indian constitution and
a pluralistic and harmonious ordering of Indian society.”
— Professor Richard Bonney
“In depth study of the evolution of Hindutva ideology. For the first time certain
sources have been used and that makes it a unique work of scholarship.”
— Professor Manoranjan Mohanty
“It is an excellent work, politically very important and academically brilliant.”
— Dr. Ram Puniyani
“It is a careful and thought provoking study of the RSS. It seeks to carry the debate
over the character of Indian nationalism forward and to locate it in the nature and
character of the RSS both as an organization and as a movement. It is written after
extensive research on the source materials and reflects a deep and long engagement
with the subject.” — Professor Imtiaz Ahmed
Link for procuring Shamsul Islam’s books in English, Hindi & Urdu:
https://tinyurl.com/shams-books
Contact number: Delhi, India 91-9868656614

Abstract In this paper, it is argued that colonial policies facilitated the development of ethnicized religious communities in South Asia and that, despite the secular credentials of its leadership,'India'could not help but be imagined by its new citizens primarily in terms of its 'Hindu'ethno-religious traditions. As long as the nationalist leadership remained committed to a secular vision intelligible in western terms as the separation of religion and politics, nationalism would remain an elite phenomenon.

The Indian Union is a nation because its state declares it to be one, its citizens imagine it is one, and others accept it as one; but the one nation is a composite nation of many nations, several types of nation, of regions that may or may not be nations, and of many possible nations; and all of them, both the one and the many, harbour two concepts of nation, the civic and the ethnic, or the secular and the communal. The civic or the secular implies that all inhabitants of the territory of the nation belong to the nation and vice versa; and the ethnic or the communal suggests that the nation is constituted by only one community. While the Indian nation is accepted, the regional nations seem to be only grudgingly acknowledged if at all. The relation between the nation and its parts is usually examined under the rubrics of 1) federalism, or the constitutional relations between the centre and the states, 2) democracy, or the electoral politics of the national parties, the regional parties, and their myriad coalitions at all levels, and 3) economic development, of regional growth and disparities. It is seldom studied as a relation between a nation and its constituent nations, an issue that goes far beyond federalism, democracy, and regional development, but embraces all of them. The Indian nation is often seen as composed of discrete communities of caste, language, tribe, and religion, but not of the decisive political communities of the regional nations; and Indian pluralism is celebrated or deplored through the clichés "unity in diversity" and "fissiparous tendencies" for these types of non-national communities constituting or threatening respectively the unity of the nation. But if India is regarded a nation of nations, over and above the supposedly primordial relations of caste, language, tribe, and religion, the modern and novel territorial relation of the Indian nation to the regional nation would appear to structure all other.

The article concerns itself with the current phase of the Indo-Naga peace talks, seemingly rendered intransigent on the contentious issue of administrative integration of contiguous Naga-inhabited areas. It historically examines the ethno-territoriality of the Naga national movement in the states of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. This article finds that notwithstanding the soundness of the claims, Naga territoriality is not a non-negotiable given but an active construction of the changing politics of the movement. The findings suggest that any proposed federal arrangement should balance ethno-territorial urges with historical peculiarities. A substantial measure of non-territorial autonomy, in a mutually binding federal arrangement, would necessitate a redefinition of both Naga ethno-national aspirations and the post-colonial Indian state’s insecurities. However, it holds the potential for sustainable peace in the region.

Since the nineteenth century, many authors have seen the campaign of Alexander the Great in the Punjab as a pivotal moment in the history of the Indian subcontinent. British historians writing during the apex of Britain’s colonial rule perceived it as the coming
of Western culture and civilisation. Nationalistic Indian historians saw the Maurya Empire, which was established shortly after Alexander’s incursion, as a patriotic reaction to the foreign oppressor. This paper discusses both historiographical interpretations and questions Alexander’s role in the emerging of the Maurya Empire, emphasising underlying structural reasons instead.

This essay about the changing architecture of Brahmanical shrines in Goa uses archival images to argue that the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth was the heyday of the Goan temple, an architectural type of pronounced heterogeneity. A significant number of temples were rebuilt at this time into this form, along with the definitive establishment of a vocabulary that drew from the European Renaissance and Baroque, as well as the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughals. These developments happened against a backdrop of the rising influence of the dominant Brahmanical castes of Goa, especially the Saraswats. Not only was the control of most temples now formally in their hands, this was also a time when these castes, long the pillars of the Estado da Índia, were consolidating their forces and finding new opportunities for employment and prosperity. These were all surely connected to the propagation of a new and cosmopolitan architecture that reflected their wealth, influence, modern-ness, and also Goan-ness. But by the 1940s, Indian nationalism was in the air, especially amongst these elites, and their temples were found to fall short of the new mood. The result was to reject Europe and embrace the Indo-Saracenic, the 'local' style popular in British India. Thus began the demise of the Goan temple, which would accelerate after the Indian annexation of Goa in 1961.The cosmopolitan architecture that had once flaunted the success and worldliness of its Goan patrons had now become an embarrassment.

The study of the movement for making Odisha a separate province is often projected as the democratic and inclusive process, which is often contradictory in its material reality. The present study is taking an important concept i.e. the hegemony, to understand as well as examining the politics of nationalism in the context of colonial Odisha.

Contributes simultaneously to both British imperial and Indian history. This work demonstrates that missionary understandings and interactions with India, rather than being party to imperial ideologies, often diverged from metropolitan and imperial norms.

This paper sees the contestation over Sikh role in 1857 as the issue of two competing nationalisms and attempts to tie up multiple and
tangled aspects of the relationship between Punjabi/Sikh nationalism and Indian nationalism with the aim of drawing up as clear a picture as possible of the Sikh role in 1857.