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Moderate Nationalism - Sanjay Seth
Moderate Nationalism - Sanjay Seth
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SANJAY SETH
THE PHENOMENA OF NATIONALISM AND THE NATION-STATE are at once general and yet
irreducibly particular. It is perfectly meaningful to talk about nationalism and the
nation-state "in general," given the ubiquity of these phenomena, yet nationalism is
always someone's claim that their cultural, religious, linguistic, or other particularity
be given political expression in the form of a nation-state. The literature on
nationalism displays the same two-fold character as its object. On the one hand, it
consists of general studies of the "rise of nationalism" or the "idea of nationalism."
In recent times, there have been many such studies, with works by Ernest Gellner,
Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson, among others, provoking a stimulating
and ongoing debate.1 On the other hand, there are numerous studies of particular
nationalisms. While the general studies tend to be comparative and theoretical, the
literature on particular nationalisms tends to be strongly historiographical.
There is, quite naturally, a certain amount of traffic between the two genres. The
traffic is much heavier in one direction, however, in that accounts of nationalism in
general are necessarily parasitic on accounts of particular nationalisms. This is so
not only because not even a Gellner, Hobsbawm, or Anderson can be an expert on
every nationalism in the world, and they therefore rely on secondary literature, but
more importantly because studies of nationalism-in-general are able to presume
their object, because it has been constituted for them in advance by studies of
nationalism-in-particular. The struggles with definitions and taxonomies that
characterize the more general works obscure the fact that, in a fundamental sense,
they are able to take the object of their study for granted; they already "know"what
in nineteenth-century China, for example, was part of the rise of Chinese
nationalism and what was not, because the historiography of Chinese nationalism
has already done the prior work of selecting from the mass of historical events and
constituting an object called Chinese nationalism. This can then be placed alongside
I am grateful to Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Tanika Sarkar for their comments on an earlier
version of this essay; to Michael Grossberg and the anonymous readers of the AHR for their
suggestions; and to Gyan Prakash and Vanita Seth for their comments on the penultimate draft. A
special thanks to Dipesh Chakrabartyfor engaging with successive versions.
I Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme,Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities:Reflectionson the Originand Spreadof Nationalism, rev. edn. (London, 1991). Also, Tom
Nairn, TheBreak-Upof Britain (London, 1977; 2d, exp. edn., 1981); and John Breuilly, Nationalism and
the State (Manchester, 1982; 2d edn., 1993).
95
other nationalisms (for which similar work has been done), for purposes of
evaluation, comparison, taxonomy.
It is thus in the writing of history that the work of defining, and constituting, the
object "nationalism" occurs. It is the historiography of nationalisms-in-particular
that selects, sequences, and emplots, thereby constituting the object "nationalism"
at the same moment that it narrativizesit. In so doing, it has first to determine what
is part of the story and what is not, that is, which incidents, movements, and parties
qualify as part of the history of that nationalism and which do not, which belong to
another narrative. The emergence of a middle class is only part of the history of
nationalism to the degree that this class thought of itself as belonging to a nation
and voiced nationalist demands; otherwise, this "fact"is part of another history (of
the middle class, or of capitalism, for instance). Of course, all narratives select,
sequence, and emplot; that is how chronicle is transformed into historical narrative.
What is in part distinctive about narratives of nationalism is that here the process
of constituting a historical narrative lends itself to a certain circularity. The
identification/selection of what is part of the story of nationalism necessarily occurs
at the level of ideas and consciousness; but this consciousness or sentiment has then
to be situated, and is often explained, in terms of the social forms and practices in
which it was embodied. To continue the example raised above, it is only when a
middle class, or a section of it, raises nationalist demands, organizes or joins
political parties or movements that seek a nation-state, and so forth, that all this
becomes part of the story of nationalism. In telling this story, narratives of
nationalism (because they are historical narratives, wedded to certain notions of
explanation and causality) ask "why" this sentiment or idea emerged; they then
frequently, and retrospectively as it were, provide a "material"or social explanation
for the rise of nationalism precisely in terms of the rise of the middle class.
That such explanations are plausible is partly because to proceed thus is simply
to reproduce the historical method, as it is most often practiced, and partly because
it accords with our intuitive understanding of this particular historical object. One
cannot write the history of nationalism simply as a history of ideas, for nationalism
is, more obviously than (say) G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy, anchored in the social
and material; mass mobilizations and political parties are not just the "context"that
helps us to locate and understand nationalism but the very stuff of it. Nor, we
recognize, can we write about nationalism solely in terms of material transforma-
tions and impersonal social processes, for nationalism is also about forms of
self-understanding, identity, and imagination, as embodied in social practices and in
discourse. Thus it seems appropriate to write the history of nationalism as both, and
from there it is a small step to establishing a causal relation between them.
It may be that this "small step" is in fact deeply problematic for any sort of
history. However, here I do not wish to be drawn into these larger arguments.
Sticking to the subject of nationalism, my point is that in the historiography of
nationalism it is evident that the object of the narrative is identified in terms of
consciousness and the social forms in which this comes to be embodied, and yet that
the latter then frequently functions as the explanation for the rise of and character
of the former. It is this form of explanation, characteristic of the history of
nationalism, that this essay seeks to call into question. It does so not by denying that
nationalism is both material and discursive, and certainly not by seeking to reverse
the causal order, but rather by problematizing the distinction between the social or
material and the discursive.
I offer for this purpose an examination of Indian nationalism, more specifically of
what in the historiographyof Indian nationalism is usually characterized as an early,
or beginning, period. I concentrate on early or "moderate" Indian nationalism
because its claim to being part of the story of nationalism is already problematic;
how it comes to be written into the history of Indian nationalism brings out clearly
the principles of selection involved in narrating the history of nationalism and the
sort of historical problems this narrative sets itself. This essay, then, offers an
alternative or supplementary reading of a period in the history of Indian nation-
alism and, in so doing, also seeks to problematize the narratives of Indian
nationalism. It is an essay in history, as well as on historiography.
MOST ACCOUNTS OF INDIAN NATIONALISM INCLUDE, or begin with, the last two or three
decades of the nineteenth century. They do so despite the fact that in the
pre-Congress era, as in the early years of the Indian National Congress (INC), the
goal of Indian nationalists fell well short of full national independence, and the
methods they employed in pursuit of their goals included neither mass mobilization
nor the extra-constitutionalist methods that were later to be characteristic of the
Congress. Why this should qualify as part of the story of Indian nationalism at all
is, therefore, itself a question. Part of the answer is simply that for many historical
accounts the history of Indian nationalism is synonymous with the history of the
Indian National Congress, and therefore all activities associated with the Congress
form part of the history of nationalism. This is either taken to be so self-evident as
to require no argumentation, or else the equation is justified by the claim that the
Congress was the first body organized on an all-India scale, and that sought to speak
for Indians, rather than (as with earlier organizations) Bengalis, landholders,
Hindus, or Muslims, or their caste brethren.2
For histories for which nationalism in India is the vehicle for the arrival of the
modern-and there are many such-the early period of the Congress belongs to the
history of nationalism because, even if it was rather half-heartedly nationalist, it was
nonetheless part of the story of the modern. This is particularly, though not
exclusively, true of Marxist and left-liberal accounts. Thus in the communist R.
Palme Dutt's influential book of 1940, India To-Day, for the early Indian bourgeoi-
sie that provided the leadership of the early Congress, "The main enemy was not
British rule as such, but the backwardness of the people, the lack of modern
development of the country, the strength of the forces of obscurantism and
ignorance"; and thus despite the limitations of their nationalism, "they represented
at that time the most progressive force in Indian society."3For the same reason, the
21For a recent example, see B. N. Pande, gen. ed., A CentenaryHistory of the Indian National
Congress(1885-1985), 4 vols. (New Delhi, 1985), vol. 1, especially the "Foreword"by the then prime
minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi.
3R. Palme Dutt, India To-Day (London, 1940), 288, 289. Earlier, one of the first Indian Marxists,
M. N. Roy, had delivered a similarjudgment. "The fathers of Indian nationalism could be called rather
"patriotic princes" and suchlike, those who were also critical of the British
administration of India but who came to be seen as part of the pre-modern past that
nationalism was to sweep away, do not generally find an honorable place in such
narratives.
Therefore, either because they were part of the Congress, or because they were
part of the story of the emergence of the modern in India, the early leaders of the
Congress find a place-often as the beginning of nationalism-in most accounts of
Indian nationalism. However, the description of the various activities directed at
securing political and economic reform in the period 1870-1905 as "nationalist"is
frequently qualified; usually, this is designated as the period of "moderate
nationalism."
The term "moderate" is used in one of three ways. It can signify the historians'
adoption of a term commonly used at the time. Rendered in uppercase, "Moderate"
serves to distinguish and contrast this nationalism from its "Extremist"competitor
and critic. A second use of the term occurs where what is being stressed is the
ambiguous or two-sided nature of the phenomenon-that it was nationalist but in
a very qualified fashion, because its demands were modest and were accompanied
by loyalty to crown and empire. Almost all uses of the phrase "moderate
nationalism" fall into this category, although they may fall into the other categories
as well.
A third use is one that incorporates the second, but where additionally this
"ambiguity"is seen as a "lack," as incompleteness. Since "lack" is a relative term
implying a contrasting notion of plenitude, and incompleteness is measured against
completion, this occurs when moderate nationalism has been inserted into a
narrative that has a conception of a fuller, more complete nationalism as its
culminating point. Here, very frequently, all three meanings or uses of the term are
invoked: moderate nationalism is contrasted to extremist nationalism, a contrast
that highlights the ambiguous or qualified nature of this nationalism; and this
ambiguity is interpreted as a lack, an incompleteness that is later overcome. In
constituting its object, "Moderate Nationalism," in this way, historiography also
defines its own task in relation to it, namely, to explain the reasons for the
incompleteness of moderate nationalism.
For nationalist histories of Indian nationalism, with their built-in teleology in
which all roads lead inexorably to the climax of 1947, the task is easy. The rise and
triumph of Indian nationalism being equally inevitable, the period between these is
presented as a period of natural growth and development-the different "mo-
ments" in the self-unfolding of Nationalism-as-Spirit. Thus the "moderation" of
moderate nationalism is construed as a sign of beginnings, of an immaturity
destined to be transcended. This is often rendered metaphorically-moderate
nationalism was a "base" on which subsequent foundations were laid; it was the
childhood of a nationalism that later grew to maturity (although, in a curious mixing
constitutional democrats and reformers than nationalists"; the reason they nonetheless qualified as
fathers of nationalism was because they rebelled against "social conservatism and religious supersti-
tion." Roy, India in Transition(1922; rpt. edn., Bombay, 1971), 168, 174. For a discussion of Roy's
analyses of Indian nationalism, see Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theoryand Nationalist Politics: The Case of
Colonial India (New Delhi, 1995), chap. 3.
privilege and immersion in the urban, colonial world of law courts, universities, and
the professions, prevented them from speaking in a more culturally self-confident
and politically assertive manner.8
As the diversity of these examples indicate, I am placing under the same rubric
what in other and important respects are quite different forms of history writing-
Marxist and non-Marxist, avowedly social history and political history, and so on.
What they do have in common, however, is that they construct the field of the
historiographyof nationalism in the same way: the rejection of explanation in terms
of immanence leads to the search for material or social factors, seen as "external"
to nationalist discourse, as explanations for the character and development of
nationalist discourse. The object of explanation, nationalism, is defined and
constituted in terms of its discourse, and necessarily so, as has been argued above;
but the "understanding" of this phenomenon then works backward to find the
origins and causes of it in the social. Historical explanation thus consists of
recovering a social cause and showing how it operated to shape an ideological
"consequence."
Below, I offer a different reading of Moderate Nationalism, in part by departing
from the methodological procedures that, I have suggested, underpin the histori-
ography of Indian nationalism. As a first step, I identify the key elements of
moderate nationalism; the individual elements that collectively constituted the
discourse of Moderate Nationalism, and constituted it as "moderate."
FIRST OF ALL, this was a nationalism that raised very modest demands. The main
demands articulated at the annual sessions of the Congress in its early years had to
do with expanding the powers of the Provincial and Central Councils and
introducing elected members into them, holding the civil service examination in
India as well as England, separating the judicial and executive functions, extension
of trial by jury to areas not covered by this, reduction of the increasing burden of
the "Home Charges" (particularlythose charges debited to India that arose out of
British military adventures), income tax reform, opposition to increases in the salt
tax, extension of Permanent Settlement, reform of the police, and repeal of forest
laws. The issue of "poverty" was central to the concerns of the Congress, and
resolutions to do with it generally expressed concern at the dimension of the
problem and advocated measures-Permanent Settlement, Indianization of the
civil service, reduction in Home Charges, the introduction of responsible govern-
ment-that either by reducing the colonial drain of wealth or facilitating industrial
development would alleviate the problem.
In general, this nationalism sought reform of the bureaucracy that ruled India,
the key elements in such reform being Indianization of the Indian civil service and
the introduction of some measure of responsible government. Surendranath
Banerjea, two-time president of the INC and frequently the one to move resolu-tions
on the twin issues of civil service reform and responsible government, explained in
his autobiography that he felt that these "lay at the root of all other Indian
8 See, for instance, Sumit Sarkar'ssplendid Modern India 1885-1947 (Delhi, 1983), 91-92.
problems, and their satisfactory settlement would mean the solution of them all."9
In particular, it was argued that such administrative/politicalreforms were the key
to economic improvement. Dadabhai Naoroji, three-time INC president in 1895
and the energetic propagator of the theory that England was "draining"India of
wealth, told the Congress that Indianization of the civil service "will go far to settle
the problem of the poverty of the Indian people."10In a similar vein, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale, INC president in 1905, declared, "It is with me a firm conviction that
unless you have a more effective and more potent voice in the government of your
own country, in the administration of your own affairs, in the expenditure of your
own revenues, it is not possible for you to effect much in the way of industrial
development.""1Such a link was asserted by the Congress as a body from the
beginning; its first resolution on the question of poverty, adopted at its 1886 session,
immediately went on "to record its fixed conviction that the introduction of
Representative Institutions will prove to be one of the most important practical
steps towards the amelioration of the condition of the people."'12
Such goals were modest enough. They were "nationalist" almost by default,
inasmuch as the petitioners were Indian and the petitioned British. Leading
Moderates frequently referred to the 1833 Government of India Act and the royal
proclamation of 1858-both of which had stated that natives would not be debarred
from holding office in the bureaucracy that governed India-professing to desire
nothing more than what was promised in those documents but had not in fact been
granted.13The Congress did imply that, some time in the future, India would be
ready for self-government. This was not very radical an expectation, for the idea
that the British were "preparing"Indians for eventual self-government was gaining
some strength even in official circles, especially since William Gladstone's return as
prime minister in 1880 and Lord Ripon's viceroyalty.14But all the Moderate leaders
agreed that for the moment this was impractical, and what the Congress sought was
much less. As Banerjea put it at the fourth annual session of the INC, at Allahabad,
"The people of India are, at present, neither asking for, nor thinking of,
representative government, but what they do insist on is, that an appreciable
portion of the advisers of Government should be their elected representatives."'15
Second, the means by which such goals were pursued were also exceedingly
moderate. Indeed, it was this above all else that led to sharp criticism and charges
of "mendicancy."The Moderate leaders prided themselves on, and reiterated at
every opportunity, the gradualist and constitutionalist nature of their political
activity. When the Congress adopted its first (short-lived) constitution in 1899, this
9 SurendranathBanerjea,A Nation in Making:Being the Reminiscencesof Fifty Yearsof PuiblicLife
(1925; rpt. edn., Bombay, 1963), 126.
10 Banerjea, Nation in Making, 17.
11"OurPolitical Situation" (public address, Madras,July 25, 1904), in Speechesand Writingsof Gopal
Krishna Gokhale, D. G. Karve and D. V. Ambekar, eds., 3 vols. (London, 1966), 2: 178.
12 A. Moin Zaidi and Shaheeda Zaidi, eds., The Encyclopaediaof the Indian National Congress(New
Delhi, 1976- ), 1: 138.
13 Daniel Argov points out that, until 1908, all Congress reports had a cover sheet consisting of
quotes from these acts and from British officials, under the title "Some of England's Pledges to India."
Argov, Moderatesand Extremistsin the Indian Nationalist Movement, 1883-1920 (Bombay, 1967), 39
(the cover sheet is reproduced on 38).
14 See Sarvepalli Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905 (Cambridge, 1965), 144 and following.
15 Zaidi, Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress, 1: 249.
"public meetings were means of presenting a cause to the colonial rulers rather than a method of
stirring popular enthusiasm:"Haynes, Rhtetoricand Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public
Clulturein SiuratCity, 1852-1928 (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 221.
19 "Address of the Deccan Sabha" [mimeographed, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New
Delhi], 20.
rule, declaring that "a truly British course can and will certainly be vastly beneficent
both to Britain and India."24In his case as in others, Moderate Nationalists assailed
the colonial connection for failing to fulfill its historic mission as the bearer of
liberal and "modern" institutions and values in India. British rule had been
instrumental in the planting of some modern liberal institutions and values in India,
and in the development of an elite class of educated Indians who had imbibed these
values. However, Britain was failing to complete its appointed role, as evidenced by
its selfish economic and political policies in India, and by its distrust of the very class
that it had brought forth.
The fourth characteristic feature of moderate nationalism was an almost
obsessive invocation of Indian poverty. It is indeed curious that a privileged elite
should have been so preoccupied with the issue. For the last three decades of the
nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, "poverty" was the biggest stick with
which the Congress beat the British. Apart from Naoroji's relentless publicizing of
Indian poverty and the "drain of wealth" from India to England,25 there was a
veritable flood of literature investigating the subject. Some of the landmarksin this
included P. C. Ray's The Poverty Problem in India (1895), William Digby's
"Prosperous"British India (1901), Romesh Chandra Dutt's England and India: A
Record of Progress during a Hundred Years (1897), his monumental two-volume
Economic History of India (1901-03), and Subramanya Iyer's Some Economic
Aspects of British Rule in India (1903). In the press and in books, in Congress
speeches and resolutions, India's poverty and the "drainof wealth" wereVconstantly
discussed and the blame laid at Britain's door.
There is no counterpart for such an obsessive concern with poverty in the history
of the European bourgeoisie's struggle for power, and thus it is not surprising that
this should be seen by some historians as the "immoderate" or radical face of
moderate nationalism, or even interpreted, as Bipan Chandra does, as evidence for
how a colonial elite, because it too labored under the disadvantages of colonialism,
cast its lot with "the people."26
Before we accept any such readings, however, we would do well to pause and
consider the meaning and significance of this preoccupation with poverty, given that
it was not accompanied by any equivalent concern for thepoor. The evidence on this
is overwhelming. With a few exceptions-such as its sympathy for peasant protests
at revenue enhancement, which affected the British Indian government rather than
Indian landlords (and opposition to which fitted in neatly with the theory of a "drain
24 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-BritishRule in India (London, 1901), v. A few pages later,
Naoroji declared (xii-xiii), "My whole object in all my writings is to impress upon the British People,
that instead of a disastrous explosion of the British Indian Empire, as must be the result of the present
dishonourable un-British system of government, there is a great and glorious future for Britain and
India to an extent unconceivable [sic] at present, if the British people will awaken to their duty, will be
true to their British instincts of fair play and justice, and will insist upon the faithful and conscientious
fulfilment of all their great and solemn promises and pledges."
25 The economic complaints of the nationalist elite-over excessive taxation, wasteful government
expenditures, military adventures paid for by India-were knitted together by Dadabhai Naoroji into
a more comprehensive and damning claim, namely that England was enriching itself at the expense of
India, via a "drain of wealth." For a good summaryand appraisal of Naoroji's economic theories, see
Birendranath N. Ganguli, Dadabhai Naoroji and the Drain Theory(New Delhi, 1965). See also Bipan
Chandra, The Rise and Growthof Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi, 1966).
26 See Chandra, Economic Nationalism.
27 John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress(Princeton, N.J., 1977), 236.
28 Quoted in Chandra, Economic Nationalism, 334, 336.
29 Chandra, Economic Nationalism, 353.
30 On the social backgroundof Congress leaders in this period, see McLane, Indian Nationalism and
the Early Congress.
31 Thus opposition to regulation of land tenure, factory hours, and so on was usually voiced on the
grounds that it would throttle infant Indian industries; and, moreover, that this, rather than
philanthropy,was behind such government measures.
32 By the 1890s, almost every presidential address to the Congress dilated, usually at length, on the
importance of industrial development. Lord Curzon was to complain that the twin subjects of technical
education and industrial development had "an extraordinary fascination for the tongue in India";
quoted in N. G. Chandravarkar'spresidential address at the 1900 (Lahore) Congress, in Zaidi, Congress
PresidentialAddresses, 1: 495. M. G. Ranade, one of the most articulate and influential champions of
industrialization, flatly declared, "there can be no doubt the permanent salvation of the Country
depends upon the growth of Indian Manufactures and Commerce." Ranade, Essays on Indian
Economics (Bombay, 1899), 121.
33 Ranade, Essays on Indian Economics, 186.
34 "1895 Presidential Address," in Zaidi, CongressPresidentialAddresses, 1: 257.
35 Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,"in Guha, ed., Subaltern
Studies VI (Delhi, 1992), 227.
36 Haynes makes the same point in relation to the municipal politics of Surat-that when the
educated elite spoke of the public, "No one ... suggested that the public meant anything as broad as
the entire urban population." Rhetoricand Ritual, 157.
37 Quoted in Sarkar,ModernIndia, 1885-1947, 90.
FOR THE ELITES WHO CONSTITUTED the bulk of the INC (and in this period they were
primarily an urban, British-educated and English-speaking elite), the "poverty-
stricken masses" of India were something of an unknown quantity, a rhetorical
abstraction. The divide between the nationalist elite and the bulk of the Indian
population was real and vast. Recognizing this, the historiography of Indian
nationalism has sometimes characterized this gap as the "alienation" of the
nationalist elite from the lower orders,41and pointed to this as the explanation for
many of the characteristic features of early Indian nationalism. In this "sociologi-
cal" reading, of which there are many versions, a cause external to the actual
discourse of moderate nationalism is invoked to explain the "timidity" of that
discourse. Versions of this historiographical approach differ precisely in that they
identify different causes: class distinction between the elite and masses may be seen
as the essence of alienation and hence of moderation, or else a cultural divide
between an "anglicized"leadership and a pre-modern population. In all cases, this
gap and the inability of the nationalist elite to bridge it are cited as the explanation
for the hesitancies and half-heartedness of moderate nationalism.
I do not wish to displace such explanations, for to varying degrees, they are
persuasive. I do wish, however, to problematize the sharp distinction between the
social and the discursive on which such explanations are premised, and which allow
for the former to stand as cause and the latter as effect. Let us then note, first of
all, that it is not that the nationalist elite "failed" to bridge the gap between itself
and the masses, for it never sought to do so. Aurobindo Ghose's trenchant
indictment was precisely that the Congress "has never been, and has made no honest
endeavour to be, a popular body."42While the Congress made some efforts to
involve non-English-speaking elites in its activities, it made next to none at
mobilizing non-elite groups. One of the few efforts of any significance in this
direction was undertaken by Allan Octavian Hume, the Englishman who was the
general secretary of the Congress in its early years, and who on his own initiative in
1887 circulated two leaflets in a number of vernacular languages in rural areas,
criticizing the government in unusually sharp terms. Following a very strong official
reaction, however, senior Congress leaders passed a resolution disclaiming respon-
sibility for Hume's actions, without advocating any alternative means of seeking to
enlist peasant support.43
The Congress made no such efforts because it believed that the gap between it
and the peasant masses was too vast to bridge through its efforts. Such bridging
would require a great deal of time and would be effected not through overtures
from the Congress but rather through the civilizing impact of British rule.
Prolonged exposure to the rule of law, to good government, and the extension of
education would enlighten and uplift the masses, raising them closer to the level of
the elite. In the meantime, it was in fact necessary to convince the foreign rulers
that their regenerating mission would be better accomplished if the educated
Indians who comprised the nationalist elite were to be involved in the governance
of the country. Thus the nationalist elite were not only aware of the division
between themselves and the mass of their countrymen, they constantly drew
attention to it.
This is the second complication: the gap between the moderate nationalist elite
and the mass of Indians was not simply a social cause, operating from "outside" the
discourse of nationalism to shape it but rather was very much present "in" that
discourse. It was a central theme of this nationalism that the nationalist elite be
accorded a more important place in affairs of state because it occupied a halfway
point between the British and the natives. On the one hand, the elite was closer to
the British in ideas,44 and participated in their institutions-government offices,
schools and colleges, law courts. The elites were thus better able to appreciate
British rule and understand the intentions of government than the Indian masses,
and also to understand and operate the new institutions that went with British rule.
Consequently, they were better able to explain the intentions and procedures of the
foreign ruler to the masses than that ruler was. On the other hand, they were closer
to their fellow countrymen in manners, dress, religion-closer to them, in short, in
42 Ghose, New Lamps for Old, 26, emphasis added.
43 This incident is recounted in McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress,114-18.
44 The Address of the Deccan Sabha to Montagu and Chelmsford, referred to in note 19, claimed of
educated Indians, "They are the only class in this country imbued with ways of thought more akin to
those of their rulers," 11.
"sentiment."As a result, they were much better fitted than the British to recognize
the needs and aspirations of India's masses and transmit these to their foreign
rulers. Or so the argument went, with the nationalist elite simultaneously drawing
attention to its distance from the masses and also its relative closeness to them. It
characterized itself, in short, as mediating between the British and the masses.
Naoroji told those attending the second session of the Congress, "we, the educated
classes, have become the true interpreters and mediators between the masses of our
countrymen and our rulers."45
The idea that the new elites would function to translate and disseminate the
British mission was one that in ruling circles was at least as old as Thomas
Babington Macaulay's Minute on Education (1835). Almost thirty-five years after
Macaulay'sMinute, Lord Napier was to tell the graduates of Madras University that
Macaulay had succeeded: "you, the adopted children of European civilization, are
the interpreters between the stranger and the Indian, between the Government and
the subject."46However, soon after the founding of the Congress, official circles
began vigorously to deny the obverse: the idea that these elites could lay any claim
to representing the peasantry. Indeed, it became a standard means of dismissing
Congress criticism of the British administration to declare that the Congress only
spoke for a small, sectional class interest. Against this, the nationalist leadership
would assert all the more strongly, and at every available opportunity, that its very
Indianness gave it a special, privileged insight into the needs of the masses, of a sort
a foreigner could never hope to have. The rejoinder of Pherozshah Mehta, eminent
Indian lawyer and Moderate leader, was representative: "the microscopic minority
can far better and far more intuitivelyrepresent the needs and the aspirations of
their own countrymen than the still more microscopic minority of the omniscient
District Officers."47
The gap between the nationalist elite and the masses will not, then, serve to
explain fully the character, and limits, of this nationalism. This gap did not simply
operate as an external cause, shaping the discourse of moderate nationalism; it
occupied a prominent place in that discourse. Drawing attention to the gap was part
of the discursive strategy of moderate nationalism; it was part of the nationalist case
as to why British rule needed to take a different form, one in which the Indian elites
would play a greater role in administering the country.
We must look, therefore, not only to the relation between "moderate" discourse
and the "social"but the place of the social in that discourse, not only to the relation
of the nationalist elite to the masses but to its perception of that relationship. We
know that the elite that made up the Congress in this period made a point of sharply
distinguishing between itself and the masses, and we know further that it was
integral to moderate nationalist discourse to declare that the masses could not
represent themselves but needed to be represented. We need now to find what
precisely it was that, in the eyes of this elite, made it an elite, very different from
the rest of its countrymen, and also why in its view its countrymen could not
represent themselves but needed the good offices of the elite to do so for them.
URBANMIDDLE-CLASS
ATTITUDES
toward the lower orders encompassed a wide range,
which included apprehension, incomprehension, paternalistic condescension, and
contempt.48 More interesting than the attitudes of the elite, however, were the
perceptions and criteria in which they were anchored. A wide variety of terms were
available to characterize the "masses"and distinguish them from the elite, and thus
the series of binaries: ignorant/educated, superstitious/enlightened, poor/wealthy,
impure/pure, low caste/high caste, rough/cultured.49The terms and the contrasts
did not always imply contempt for the masses; often, they would be used
sympathetically, in order to draw attention to their plight. The contrasts were, of
course, not mutually exclusive; many could be mapped onto each other. However,
the contrasts drew on different codes of meaning and power: a code corresponding
to the rigid hierarchies but also reciprocities of a semi-feudal social order
underpinned some contrasts; a code of civic affairs and impersonal bureaucratic
procedures, other contrasts. The distinctions that underpinned the master/servant
relationship and provided the criteria regulating action within that relationship, for
instance, were very different from those underpinning and regulating the relation-
ship between superior and subordinate in a government office.
Because the many contrasts or oppositions used to distinguish elite from masses
derived from different codes, they could neither be reduced to so many expressions
of a single distinction nor articulated onto each other to form a clear and coherent
opposition. Thus if one asked what precisely was the elite characterization of the
difference between elite and the masses, there would be no "precise" answer, only
a shifting and unstable combination of the terms above, with the shifts and
inflections varying according to context of use. Collectively, they did add up to a
general sense of an elite/mass divide, constituted at many levels; but, in any specific
context, some distinctions were obviously more relevant, and more appropriately
invoked, than others.
The context we are examining is a specific one; it pertained to the public, civic
domain of government bodies and courts that were, or were meant to be, founded
on and regulated by certain rationalized, bureaucratic norms. In this context, when
the distinction between elite and masses had to be given voice, certain contrasts
were clearly more suitable than others. That is, when it came to articulating the
divide between masses and elite with specific reference to representative govern-
ment and the franchise, contrasts that derived from or corresponded to the
institutions, processes, and ideas of British rule and colonial institutions were more
48 Some instances of the attitudes of early Congress leaders to the lower orders are detailed and
discussed in McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress,67-73.
49 For instance, when a variety of Indian newspapers, English and vernacular, referred to the
ordinary people as "ignorant rustics" in thrall to "superstitious"beliefs, and practicing "filthy habits"
and prone to violence once aroused and desperate (see David Arnold, "Touching the Body:
Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900," in Ranajit Guha, ed., SubalternStudies V [Delhi, 1987],
89), in the context of measures designed to combat the plague epidemic, it was clear that the editors
and their readers were by contrast educated, urban and urbane, rational, orderly, and hygenic.
cherished of them all. It is high education which has made local Self-Government
the success that it is admitted to be. It is again high education which has elevated
the tone of the Indian Press."53The institutional changes effected by British rule
transformed India "externally,"but this would have remained purely external had
not education created a class of Indians capable of "internalizing"the regenerative
effects of British rule. Put another way, the institutions and processes accompany-
ing British rule regenerated India; but the regeneration of India was ultimately
contingent on the regeneration of Indians, and it was education that was the
instrument of this, that created the Indians capable of operating, and making full
use of, the other boons of British rule. The Deccan Sabha recognized this:
enumerating the numerous benefits of British rule in its "Address"to Montagu and
Chelmsford, it added, "Its greatest gift has been to bring within our reach the
blessing and benefit of English education which has helped us to avail of and
assimilate the civilizing elements which accompany and distinguish your rule."54
Education, then, occupied a special place in the discourse of moderate nation-
alism and, indeed, elite nationalism more generally. The dissemination of European
knowledge was accorded a privileged role in the "regeneration of India," because
it "generated" a new class of Indians, Indians who had imbibed the spirit that
animated all institutional and other transformations effected by the British.
Because education transformed people and not only institutions, and because its
reach was very limited rather than universal, it also acted as a source of social
differentiation, in a way that "good government" or "rule of law" did not. Through
English education, its products in the nationalist movement declared, a new class of
Indians had emerged, distinguished from their countrymen by their capacity to
understand, negotiate, and operate the spaces and processes and representative
institutions of the new India being created by British rule. Education, which gave
access to the spirit animating the transformation of India, consequently gave those
who possessed it "voice" in the new institutions of that new India. By that same
logic, it rendered many others, who did not have access to this new spirit and these
skills, mute; or, if they were the many without voice or influence even in pre-British
India, rendered them further mute.
Thus it was that education came to be singled out for special attention in elite
nationalist discourse. It served, on the one hand, as an important factor that, in the
domain of a new "public" life dominated by British-created institutions, distin-
guished elite from the non-elite. Further, the grounds of the distinction were such
that distinguishing between elite and masses on the grounds of education simulta-
neously explained why the latter could not represent themselves but needed to be
represented; education gave voice, and thus the "dumbmasses" could not speak for
themselves but needed the elite to do so.
THE NATION, BENEDICT ANDERSON TELLS US in his work of the same title, is an
"imagined community." Once a nationalism has made good its claim that a certain
real enough, was not simply the cause of a discursive consequence but present in
that discourse as an important, structuring element. I have instead offered another
account, in which the moderation of Moderate Nationalism lay not in a failure to
imagine the nation, in an insufficiency or lack of nationalism to be explained by an
external cause, but rather in the fact that its imagination was one in which the
"nation"included people unfitted for political rights, in which politics was identified
with that domain of public life created and made possible by British rule, in which
the inadequacies of "the people" were measured by their distance from this domain,
in which the educated elites had to represent the poor, rough, and ignorant masses,
and where the continuation of British rule was necessary for its eventual superses-
sion.
If the arguments advanced here are persuasive, they have two implications. The
first and the more obvious is that the protocols governing the writing of the history
of nationalism need to be amended. Social and material factors are critical to
characterizing nationalism; what they will not satisfactorily do is then double up as
causes. But this is largely negative-it offers no alternative protocols except in the
minimal sense of urging that both the "social background" and the discourse of
nationalism are important to characterizing the phenomenon, but that neither will
stand in as cause for the other. The second implication follows from the first, and
I will conclude by sketching this.
What I have called the dominant trend in historiography has, because of the
weight it attaches to the social background of nationalism-to class, caste, systems
of land tenure, for instance-rendered our understanding of Indian nationalism far
more complex and variegated. It may be possible to render national imaginings
homogeneous, as nationalist historiographydoes; but the immense diversity of land
systems, castes, and forms of surplus appropriation in India defy any such
homogenizing. Thus attention to these has resulted in a more detailed, and more
complex, account of nationalism; such histories have drawn our attention to the
many variations across caste, class, and region. The study of Indian nationalism has
tended to become increasingly a task for monographs. This has not, however,
resulted in a dissolution of the object into its parts, because underlying the diversity
of studies are a set of shared protocols and methodological assumptions. These hold
out the promise that in the end we will find a common set of factors at work; surely,
for such a diverse country to have conceived of the nation in the first place could
only be because beneath or across all the variations there must have been some
common social/material factors at work? We will, then, end up with a more complex
and nuanced account of nationalism, but it will be possible to integrate the
researches of all the monographs into a few, synthetic studies.
Now, the weak or minimalist protocols that are left if one abandons some of these
methodological presumptions hold out no such hope. If imaginings of the nation-
which is what any history of nationalism has to begin with-are many and varied,
and cannot necessarily be reduced to a smaller number of causes, then it would
appear that the task of sorting, ordering, and relating these, of constructing a
narrative, holds out many possibilities. Rather than a variety of accounts that differ
because they address different regions or class configurations (but that can
ultimately all become part of the one larger, synthetic narrative), we have the
possibility of many, even incommensurable, accounts of the nationalisms of India.
The prospect of more rather than less narratives will no doubt fill some with
dismay. But in part at least, that describes the already existing state of affairs and
helps make sense of it. More important, India is a place that, to borrow Sudipta
Kaviraj's felicitous phrase, is normally "humming with political narratives"56but
that has seen the rise to influence of a movement and ideology that would allow only
one understanding of nationalism and one definition of what it means to be Indian.
At such a time, to acknowledge and embrace the possibility of many histories, and
thus also of many ways of being Indian, is more necessary than ever before.
56 Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra
Pandey, eds., SubalternStudies VII (Delhi, 1993), 3.