Abstract
The idea of nationalism has been challenged in recent times but it still continues to influence the thoughts and actions of a great many people in the world. Javed Majeed, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the King’s College, London, has added to the existing discussion on the subject in his most recent book. His aim is to find out the impact which travel to the West produced in the minds of Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, the three names he mentions in the subtitle of the book. He restricts himself by leaving out of his analysis the journeys of the people from one part of the country to the other, of which there are many accounts in the Indian languages. That he eschews the holistic approach is clear from the introduction to the book, where he says: While biographers have tended to approach Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal as coherent and unified figures, I assume that they can only be dealt with in parts and fragments, rooted in their own self conceptions as they express them in their autobiographies. They self-consciously enact changing, mobile and heterogenous selves as they travel. (p. 3)
Majeed uses his knowledge of Urdu and Persian to examine the accounts written in these languages by Indians travelling to the West from the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus, he draws attention to the Shigurf-Namah-i Velat (1781) of Mirza I‘tisam-ud-din, the first Bengali to have visited Europe (1765). That he had gone to report about the misdeeds of some members of the Council in Calcutta that wielded power on behalf of the East India Company and that he had been honoured by the University of Oxford for his scholarship are facts which have not found place in Majeed’s account. I‘tisam-ud-din’s efforts were foiled by the machinations of Clive. An English rendering of his account was provided by James Edward Alexander and published from London in 1827. Majeed also refers to the Travels of Abu Taleb Khan, who undertook a journey through various parts of Asia and Africa to Europe between the years 1799 and 1803. An English translation of the book by Charles Stewart appeared from London in three volumes in 1814. The condescending attitude of the British towards Indians in general is reflected in the manner in which the two translators present their works. The Indian is always referred to derisively as ‘Native of the east’. European civilisation is projected as superior even when the text in the original is of a different view. Majeed points out how the translator of Mirza I‘tisam-ud-din’s narrative leaves out passages that do not confirm to the image of the unchanging native of Hindostan. Abu Talib’s observations about the nature of European society compared to his own are also not conveyed faithfully in the translation. Majeed writes: Abu Taleb’s criticisms of British modes of conduct and his defense of the social and cultural position of Indian Muslim women compared with English women challenge this imposed trajectory of uncritical adulation. Stewarts’s blanket term ‘Native of the East’ also empties Abu Taleb’s cosmopolitan identity of its complex specificities. The static term ‘Native’ fails to take into account Abu Taleb’s description of the very changes and dislocations in his social and economic position as a member of the Persianate service gentry in late eighteenth-century India which led him to travel to Europe. (p. 14)
This tendency of viewing people from the non-European world as ethnographic models rooted in the surroundings to which they belong and unadaptable to change is what Edward Said characterised as a prominent feature of ‘Orientalism’. (Absence of reference to Said’s work in Majeed’s writing is baffling.) The trend continued in the writings of British colonial administrators until the time of Herbert Risley and the census reports with which his name is associated, that is, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not until the Indian national movement matured that this idea was finally dropped.
In drawing a contrast between these early travel accounts from India to the West, on the one hand, and the introspective nature of the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, on the other, Majeed has no space for what went on in between. This is an unfortunate lapse since the world was changing all the time. The wealth of ancient Indian thought had first been unlocked by British Orientalists, such as Sir William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke and H.H. Wilson. Unitarians in Britain and the US were attracted by Rammohun Roy’s criticism of the concept of Trinity in his debate with the Serampore missionaries. A section of enlightened opinion in the West left behind the idea of the Oriental as something exotic and began to take keen interest in the civilisation of other countries. An early example of this is to be found in the book The Last Days in England of Raja Rammohun Roy by Mary Carpenter. Equally impressive was the tour of England and France by Dwarkanath Tagore in 1842 as described by Blair Kling in his book Partners in Empire. The Queen of England even thought of conferring a knighthood on him. Later, Brahmo leaders, such as Keshab Chunder Sen, Pratap Chunder Mazoomdar and Sibnath Sastri, also found a receptive audience in England. Pratap Chunder Mazoomdar was indeed one of the advisors to the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893. Swami Vivekananda’s historic address at this Parliament and his subsequent lectures on Hinduism in Britain and the US left a deep impact on the audience and marked the beginning of a new phase of interest in the Hindu religion. Jagadish Chandra Bose placed India on the map of scientific researches in the world by his exposition at the International Congress of Physics arranged as a part of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Rabindranath Tagore also made two trips to England in1878 and 1890, which he recounted in his autobiography (Reminiscences) and few travelogues in Bengali. Perceptions about India in the West and the West in India were undergoing simultaneous change. A fruitful line of enquiry extends here. Already, we have Tapan Raychoudhuri’s book Europe Reconsidered through the writings of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteenth century. Brahmo leaders of the same period, such as Keshab Chunder Sen and Pratap Chunder Mazoomdar, have also left behind their own accounts of their experiences in the West (e.g., see Keshab Chunder Sen in England and Tour Round the World by Mazoomdar). Spencer Lavan’s pioneering study The Unitarians and India is equally instructive.
About the autobiographies and travel accounts of national leaders in the period before the rise of Gandhi, Majeed’s view may best be illustrated with reference to his remarks about the writings of Surendranath Banerjee and Lala Lajpat Rai. He writes in the very introduction to his book: The self they enact in subsumed within a totalizing nationalism which makes autobiography not so much the performance of emerging singularity but more the disappearance of self into a totalizing nationality. (p. 4)
Nationalism, in spite of its many aberrations in the West, has been a liberating and constructive force among the former colonies of the European powers. It can by no means be said to have been of a ‘totalising’ nature during the period Majeed refers to here. Surendranath Banerjee’s title for his autobiography was A Nation in the Making. Nationalism in India then was still in a formative stage but far, very far, from being of a ‘totalising’ nature. It offered a release of the self from the constraints of foreign rule. On the Indian subcontinent, the idea of nationalism was first spread by the Hindu intelligentsia, notably of Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra. In The Story of My Life, Lajpat says it was the anti-Hindu bias of the Islamic texts that repelled him and made him embrace Hinduism (‘This attachment was not so much theological or religions, it was nationalistic.’—The Story of My Life, Chap. 17). Muslims had still to make their mark on a large scale in the nationalist movement. Lajpat’s early studies were conducted in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. His early education stood him in good stead when during his prison days at the Mandalay Fort he found relief and strength in the words of the great Persian poet Hafiz. Like Aurobindo Ghosh in prison, Lajpat also derived strength during this period from the teachings of Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Majeed (pp. 155–57) sees in Lajpat’s career a turning away from the syncretic background of his father to Hindu nationality from the time of his joining the Arya Samaj and then finally a process in reverse from the period of his confinement at the Mandalay jail. These stages in his opinion are not overlapping but a sign of vacillation on his part. This, however, is contradicted by facts. For at the height of the nationalist agitation in the year 1906, we find Lajpat drawing the government’s ire by enquiring into the mysterious death of a Muslim constable through the columns of The Punjabee, a popular journal that carried his blessings, and then by sharing a political platform with a Muslim speaker prior to his deportation to Mandalay.
Majeed scours the response to travel in the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal to prove his thesis which, as he says at the end of the book, is ‘to deny oneself as one embraces nationalism to generate hatred and violence towards Others within India’. He points out how truth for Gandhi is not something that is fixed at some point of time, but changes in significance with changes in surroundings. For Nehru, the journey was one of trying to seek out the roots of his identity after receiving his education in England. The Discovery of India should therefore be read as a sequel to his Autobiography. Iqbal in his famous poem, the Javed Namah, describes the journey of his soul through successive phases of Islamic history. The river Cauvery represents the flow of his creative vitality. While Nehru’s sense of history envisaged the reopening of pre-colonial trade and travel routes between Europe and Asia, Iqbal’s poem in Majeed’s opinion reveals that ‘European self-conceptions about their own modernity rely on a deliberate forgetting of their Islamic predecessory in order to postulate a unique and unprecedented moment for their modernity’ (p. 120). Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal were not confined to writing their accounts only. They played a major part in the political life of the nation. How far they and their followers translated their words into action is a question that remains unattended in the end.