India and the Nation-State Model

Introduction

If anybody tries to find a Europe in India, one is bound to fail. Europe has its own history to tell its people, that of a linear growth that neatly fits into a Christian template that has governed the aspects of events to be preserved and those to selectively forget (Warren, 1998, pp. 67–68).

India, at least the one where the ‘white sahibs’ set their shop in, was indeed a ‘politically’ fragmented realm from the Western perspective. What is oft forgotten is that the bulk of the dharmashastras and arthashastras were written by Brahmins, the priests of the society. European wisdom reduces them to mere arbiters of religion and counsels to the rulers in the political set-up. ¹

Yet, all corners of India inhabited this section of people called Brahmins, and they recited the same shrutis, the Vedas, which was the deep culture that influenced the popular culture. Vedangas bound the calendar of the entire subcontinent with the same jyotisha, influenced the structure of all Indian languages and influenced popular culture through Natyashastra (Balakrishna, 2018).

Siksha, or education, and vyakarana, or grammar, that is uniform across all native languages of the land are but limbs of the same Vedas, propagated by Brahmins (National Institute of Open Schooling, 2012, p. 83). Vedas also have a very important thing to say about the Supreme Being, that It is One: आसीदेकमेवािद्वतीयं (Chandogya Upanishad (CU), 6.2.1), which is translated by Radhakrishnan (1968, pp. 447–448) as ‘one only without a second’.

Rig Veda ((RV 1.164.46), and more so CU (4.9, 4.20, 6.9), confirm this thesis by building on it and hinting at a strict monotheism that underlies popular Hinduism. These Upanishads together as jnanakanda form the basis on which stands Vedanta or uttara mimamsa as intellectual thought.

At no point does any text claim that God has exiled them and left them at the mercy of the Church, in our case, the Brahmins. ² As an omnipresent Lord, what was thus His function in society? If there is no Exile, can Kingship be about Divine Right, being anointed by God to rule in his stead? Hinsley (1986, p. 21) demonstrated that Sovereignty is a profoundly European concept for building the State, not found outside Europe.

Here, India is defined as an epistocracy that was unified by the Vedas, which governed the thought patterns of every Indian. Brahmanical hegemony extended to syncretic sects like Jainism and Buddhism that talked of One Reality, an absolution at par with the Hindu Brahman, just non-living (Jain, P., 2010). This epistocracy saw important cities, rivers, mountains and pilgrimage spots as interlinked and interconnected (Eck, 2012). Religious orders with their land grants often cultivated armies and influenced political agency through networks outside their immediate physical space. Chatterjee (2013) calls this monastic governmentality.

Comparing ‘God’ and ‘Brahman’

India has been referred to as one unified country, polity or nation precisely because Indians worshipped one God in various deified forms.

The first Indologist Alberuni (c. 1017) observed

The Hindus believe with regard to God that he is one, eternal, without beginning and end, acting by free-will, almighty, all-wise, living, giving life, ruling, preserving; one who in his sovereignty is unique, beyond all likeness and unlikeness, and that he does not resemble anything nor does anything resemble him (Jain & Jain, 2011, vol. 2, p. 128).

Consequently, he called his book Kitab-ul-Hind or ‘Book of India’ regardless of the presence of numerous rulers with their limited geographical reach.

The British were no different. A British civil servant George Forster (c. 1782) writes:

The Hindoos believe in one God, without beginning and without end whom they bestow, descriptive of his powers, a variety of epithets. But most common appellation, and which conveys the sublimest sense of his greatness, is, Sree Mun Narrain. The Hindoos, in their supplication to the Deity, address him as endowed with the three attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, which in the Sanscrit, are expressed by the terms, Neerangin, Neerakar, and Neergoon…three men, to whom he gave the names of Brimha, Vystnow, and Shevah. To the first was committed the power of creating mankind; - into the second, of cherishing them; - and to the third, that of restraining, correcting, and destroying them (Jain & Jain, 2011, p. 277 (IV)).

This similarity, however, transferred Hinduism into a variant of the Jewish Abrahamic religion and India into a variety of the nation of Israel. Dominant descriptions of Brahmins as Levites, privileged priests of the Jewish temple appointed through heredity and esteemed among the gentiles was provided by both Catholics like Pietro Della Valle and Protestants like Abraham Rogerious (De Roover, 2017, pp. 173–220). This was obviously scandalous as Indians were indulgent in practices like idolatry and were liable to fall from the grace of God of the Biblical traditions. These traditions also foretold that Israel would be fragmented and dispersed if Israelites strayed from the word of God and broke the Mosaic covenant. Israel could only be united by virtuous kings like Saul, David and Solomon as long as they enjoyed the grace of God.

God as singular in Brahman of the Hindu Brahminical culture cannot be understood without understanding the eternal order, rta. Day (1982, p. 42) writes that the Hindu gods ‘do not govern rta so much as immanentalize it through the particularities of divine ordinances and retributions concerning both rewards and punishments. In this sense they do not “govern” Ṛta; they serve it as agents and ministers’. The word rta is mentioned in RV some 390 times and is the central tenet of it (Ramakrishna, 1965, p. 45). This word cannot be translated to English but has profound implications for contemporary society.

Brahman has a feminine aspect that corresponds with prakriti, the counterpart to the masculine purusha (Taylor, Kaplan, Hobgood-Oster, Ivakhiv, & York, 2008, pp. 1299–1300). Prakriti itself means the act of primal making that excludes human agency (Lochtefeld, 2002, p. 520). Shiva and Shakti as the eternal duality of Samkhya is often compared with Yin and Yang of the Tao. ³ Yet, what is forgotten is that the term laissez faire was used to describe the change in the Nature itself when the Western powers came in contact with India and China (McCormick, 1999; Nuyen, 1999; Pieterse, 2006). The French physiocrats identified land in nature and the perpetual crop it produced as the primary source of wealth. Thus, a physiocrat, François Quesnay inspired by the Chinese, advocated Oriental despotism in medieval France (Baghdiantz, 2008, pp. 271–272).

The society as an agglomeration of differently capable individuals with varying capability of labour and shared vision of prosperity in RV (10.117) has been described as a model of market economy (Bokare, 2009, p. 100). Arthashastra of Kautilya identified land, labour and capital as the sources of wealth much before Adam Smith (Sihag, 2019). In fact, Sihag (2019) posits that Adam Smith must have consulted Kautilya’s work because his four canons of taxation and notes on undesirability of monopolies are identical to those in Arthashastra.

It has been shown that the Orient comprising India, China and most of the Asia were functioning market economies long before the rise of the West (Arrighi, 1998; Hobson, 2012; Kanagasabapathi, 2010, Kindle locations 198–568; Pieterse, 2006). This globalized space did not have the concept of nation (Arrighi, 1998). The conception of market in the East fundamentally proposes a dichotomy of a fluctuating market and stable statehood. Europe had a concept of stable statehood because the concept of market developed only when it came in contact with the Eastern world. Simultaneously, India envisioned nature in a constant state of flux (which was an aspect of Brahman) and thus rajyas, the Indian equivalent of ‘state’ must have been seen as a temporary phenomenon rather than permanent. Rajyas were subject to market risks. The durability of such risk prone structures depended on their capacity to observe and follow dharma, whose closest approximation would be to steward the war-making enterprise through a perpetually chaotic and unpredictable market.

We know from the observations of early British that village self-government and not European-style state were the foundations of Indian political and economic life. ⁴

Thomas Munro (1807) in his report on Anantapoor district writes:

Every village, with its twelve Ayangadees as they are called, is a kind of little republic, with the Potail, at the head of it; and India is a mass of such republics. The inhabitants during war, look chiefly to their own Potail. They give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred: wherever it goes the internal management remains unaltered; the Potail is still the collector and magistrate, and head farmer. From the age of Menu until this day the settlements have been made either with or through the Potails (Jain & Jain, 2011, p. 179 (IV)).

Thus, Indians as a political community may have been on one hand patriotic to the confines of the democratic village community and on the other hand ₹followed the universal dharma stemming from the discourse around Brahman.

The European binary of protection by a state or outright anarchy clearly did not exist in this cultural sphere. The primary loyalty of a citizen to his king as an aspect of political philosophy was enunciated in the works of Hobbes’ Leviathan. However, Loy (2002, p. 14) writes that ‘Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature is a secularized version of Calvin’s “natural man” without God.’ Nation as a category of people having (now or in the past) a common state and having a history through ‘homogenous empty time’ was thus an alien concept generally for Asians but specifically for Indians. ⁵ Yet, precisely because the feminine aspect of Brahman as prakriti was impersonal, the Indian freedom movement borrowed the theme in its quest for becoming a nation.

Nation as a Biblical Concept

‘In that same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, form the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates’ (Genesis, 15.8).

To Abraham’s grandson Jacob, commanded the Biblical God, Genesis (28:13, 14): ‘And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’

Jacob became Israel in Genesis (32:28) and his progeny the twelve tribes of Israel.

All medieval maps henceforth had Jerusalem at the centre of the flat world, conveying the blessedness of the land where all Biblical activity took place (Branch, 2014, p. 50).

The concept of Israel as the progenitor of the land gave birth to the concept of Nation. Anderson (2006, pp. 12–18) showed how the ontology of belonging to a wider religious society transforms into Nation. Eshel (2018, p. 33) shows how even Byzantine and Rome under Christianity tried to emulate the early Israelites to proclaim the status of elect nation and kept it alive to be appropriated by philosophers of Enlightenment.

The First and the Second Temple in His Honour in Jerusalem made it the de facto capital of a narrow strip of geopolitically unstable landmass. As Genesis (15:8) fixes the boundaries of Israel, it lies between two resource rich river basin and although no match for them economically, is fertile due to Mediterranean rain.

Such landmasses become the first scapegoat of war should an Egyptian army march to Babylon or people from the Euphrates find it in them to ‘visit’ the Nile delta. A politically disunited Israel is but an invitation to anarchy. Thus, elders pressed for a united Israel which could make treaties for safe passages of armies either way (Pfoh, 2016, pp. 161–185).

In fact, Assmann (1998, 2010) squarely places Jewish monotheism as a subsequent development to Egyptian Henotheism, the central distinction brought about by Moses, who created the dichotomy between true and false religions after the event of ‘Exodus’ from Egypt.

Events of disunity leading to the destruction of the first Temple of Solomon made Jews evangelical and zealous of unity with the construction of the second Temple. Yet, Christians, notably the Greeks, tried to build on it and spread a particular subjective truth of Israel as the objective Truth which the whole world ought to know for salvation.

India from a Non-Western Gaze

Foucault writes:

Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’. Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations (1977, p. 77).

Yet, the same activity of mapping India unto Europe or even using European social methodologies to chastise India for not being Europe makes scholars like Balagangadhara (1985, p. 7) say

We know the West as the West looks at itself. We study the East the way West studies the East. We look at the world the way West looks at it…. When Asian anthropologists or sociologists or culturologists do their anthropology, sociology or culturology – the West is really talking to itself.

India believed its own geography to be sacred, which is not synonymous with ‘holy’. It implies the presence of God or Brahman in it and not merely animating people into performing actions within that realm. Prithvi as a goddess with an immense potential of fertility and its interplay with the sky (akasha) makes them almost one deity, Dayvaprithivi, combining the masculine virility of nature with her feminine fertility. They are said to kiss the centre of the world (RV, 1.185.5); they come together to make her fertile (RV, 4.56.3); they are parents to the entire world (RV, 1.159.2). As a deity of fertility, she is unwasting, inexhaustible and full of life potential (RV, 6.70.1). She is asked to take care of a dead at their burial like a mother would hide her child gently underneath her clothing (RV, 10.18.11).

She is praised for being wide stable in (RV, 1.185) but this translates as the template of desha in the Prithu Sukta (AV 12.1), which describes the people and the vivid culture associated with the Earth and talks of agriculture. Swarup (cited in Jain, 2010, p. 150) calls the stanza the first ‘national’ song.

Post-Vedic literature like Ramayana posits characters of her into a devotional wife, complimenting the manhood of the king with her chastity forever pure (Gonda cited in Kinsley, 1988, p. 67). Sita as the cultivated furrow is embodiment of the fruits of agriculture.

The cult of river goddesses is even more pronounced often mirroring the virile fecundity of the monsoon waters associated with the Earth. Mahabharata (7.69) talks of Prithu as the ideal king who levels hills for agriculture and milks the earth like a cow. ⁶

Rashtra is defined as the polity complimenting the country, desha.

The presence of sacred geography allowed for pilgrimage in different corners of India, which consolidated the Vedic religion and morphed into Hinduism during the colonial era. In fact, Eck (2012) shows that this precise common social capital of sacred geography forms the bedrock of the political imagination of India for Indians.

The embodiment of the land as Shakti has been vividly commented upon by Kinsley (1988, pp. 178–187). He traces the depiction of Indian geography as Bharat-mata to the novel Ananda Math where Goddess Kali, in her naked and dark form is portrayed as the condition of the over-exploited realm which can and must be restored to its original glory, that of Goddess Durga, her fair and royally dressed form by chasing away the exploiters. The worship of Goddess Durga is likened to the ‘Vande Mataram’ which is adopted as the National song. This reinforces, rather than curtail the Hindu Brahmanical conception of geography as animating like Prakriti, giving limited agency to humans.

This was also true of the early Muslim intellectuals who were migrating from one governmentality to another in colonized Bengal. God was equated with Hindu ‘Brahman’ and Buddhist ‘Shunyata’ as the fatherly divine void ‘Atingok’ into which the disciple’s soul must merge (Chatterjee, 2013, p. 63). Consequently, Muslim authors like Kaikobad painted vivid imagery of Islam as the earthly feminine projection of divinity as a ‘demon slaying Hindu goddess holding the Qur’an in one hand and dispatching Kafirs with another.’ (Dey, 2015, p. xxix).

Dasgupta (1993, pp. 3–4) cites Weber to explain the contradiction between the West and the East.

India was obviously never a Biblical nation being composed of one ethnicity or ancestral root as is commonly understood. The presence of gotra, kula, jati negated the concept of common lineage. The first interlocuters with the West like Raja Rammohan Roy and Keshav Chandra Sen thus expressed a belief that India could be a nation with adequate reforms when the primary loyalties of kinship (jati, caste) were replaced by an overarching loyalty to India as a Nation. This was formalized with the birth of Indian ‘National’ Congress in 1855 (Habib, 2003).

‘Nation’ in the modern sense can be traced as a post-French Revolution event when the French as a society had to find a common identity amongst themselves, bypassing the common monarch anointed by God. The Christian hegemony remained while the divine right of the king was replaced with common lineage and shared history, ‘The Nation’.

The term nation was translated as jati by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the author of Ananda-Math (Bhattacharya, 2011, pp. 34–36). Bankim Chandra considered in this context only the Hindu community and found no word equivalent to the concept of a ‘nation’ in Bengali or Sanskrit. He concluded that nationalism in the proper sense of the term ‘was unknown to the Hindus.’ He writes on his translation of nation into Bengali as jati:

The word jati has many meanings. First, Caste in Hindu society, e.g. Brahmin, Kayastha, Koibarta. Second, jati means Nation in the sense of people in a particular country; e.g. the English, the French, the Chinese. Third, jati means Race, e.g. the Aryans, the Semetics, the Turanis, etc. Fourth, jati means Tribe, a category of people in some countries; e.g. the Jews had ten tribes among them. Fifth, jati means Species [of animals]…In Bengali language there is no word other than jati to convey all these different meanings (cited in Bhattacharya, 2011, p. 36).

The establishment of a Hindu Nation is a central theme in his work. This could be because the zeitgeist of the time was how Hindus had been disunited as a race and their subjugation to Islam was because of their disunity. He commonly links nationhood and statehood and laments the lack of an overarching political machine connected to the spirit of Hindu citizenry to stop Islamic invasions.

The zeitgeist of creation of a nation from a common culture is expressed more profoundly in others like R. G. Bhandarkar:

India has lived an individual life not a corporate or a national life….Hindus had in all likelihood, no conception of a national existence, and therefore did not concern themselves with questions about the national weal. We have an extensive religious, poetical, and legendary literature, but no work on politics or history….The effect of this indifference to corporate or national interests was that, from time to time, the country was governed by foreigners….But now, with our minds enlightened by our contact with the Western nationals, we cannot afford to be indifferent to our national and corporate interests (cited in Bhattacharya, 2011, p. 39).

There is absolutely no need to believe that ‘nation’ as a Western concept was readily accepted by Indians.

Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote India’s national anthem, had profound reservations on Nationhood, ‘[which were]…a great menace’, ‘a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of the present age eating into its moral vitality’, the very root of the colonial enterprise, the mechanization of man and culture (Tagore cited in Radhakrishnan, Roychowdhury, Hogan, & Pandit, 2003, p. 29). Thus, espousing the mask of nationhood in the anti-colonial struggle would merely replace one form of exploitation with another when the goal of independence is achieved.

It can be reasonably asserted that Tagore’s contention was with modernism at large, with the polity of ‘Nation’ as the inevitable vehicle on which it progresses and its alien characteristics with the organic linkage between men to be found elsewhere of Europe. Tagore writes on races morphing as nations:

We have to remember that in Europe, where peoples were racially united from the beginning, and where natural resources were insufficient for the inhabitants, the civilization has naturally taken the character of political and commercial aggressiveness. For, on the one hand, they had no internal complications, and on the other, they had to deal with neighbours who were strong and rapacious (Tagore, 1917, p. 95).

Tagore (1917, pp. 10–98) would criticize Nationalism not only at home but at his lectures in Japan and the West.

Conclusion

Nationalism is a hotly contested topic in India. Not only is there a secular nationalism but apparently there is also a Hindu nationalism. This is just force fitting when the key political concept of Hindu philosophy, the universal dharma transcends nations as geographical categories.

When Colonial powers came knocking in the early modern age, these epistemic questions haunted Japan, where there was a concept of dharma (Kawanami, 1999, p. 105). Yet, Japan used Buddhism as a leitmotif to infuse nationalism in its people while skirting the key issues. Cultural symbols associated with universal dharma now were associated with the parochial Japanese nation. The epistemic encounter was buried neat because the adoption of the nation-state model was successful and productive.

In India, there have been sporadic periods of high political tensions between its highly centralized post-colonial state and its even stronger society with its own epistemic understanding. This is when not much serious work has been made to understand how Indians as a political community organized themselves prior to the coming of colonizers. That historical India had a different governmentality altogether. The understanding of the political organization of the people of India before the adoption of nation-state model could provide more clues to how Indians interacted in that comparatively harmonious regime.