Ur-national and secular mythologies: popular culture, nationalist historiography and strategic essentialism

Abstract

This essay examines the dynamic between nationalist historiography and popular cultural forms in postcolonial and post-global India. Concerned primarily with liberal nationalist historiography, particularly the kind that has been labelled the ‘Tagore–Nehru synthesis’, this essay traces the evolution of the said historiography during the colonial-nationalist period, examines the interaction of this historiography with contesting discourses in postcolonial and post-global India and, in doing so, attempts to address the questions regarding the modes of coexistence of religion and nationalism in a secular nation-state.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• interpretation of India's history
• Akbar
• nationalist historiography
• Tagore
• Gandhi
• Nehru
• secularism

Notes

1. Eaton, India's Islamic Traditions, 1. 1026 CE is the date of the destruction of the temple of Somanatha by Mahmud of Ghazni; 1528 is the date of Babur's victory over the Lodi army and therefore the official date of the establishment of the Mughal Empire; 1992 is the year the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was demolished by a mob of Hindu fanatics. The Battle of Plassey that gave the East India Company its first political ascension occurred in 1757; 1885 is the year the Indian National Congress was formed; in 1947 India became an independent nation-state. What exactly happened in 1026 is not clear; historians find conflicting evidence to the nature and extent of the ‘destruction’. The date came to the forefront of public discourse when L. K. Advani, one of the top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, began his historic ‘ratha-yatra’ or ‘chariot ride’ in 1990 in Somanatha.

2. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 6.

3. Ibid., 82.

4. Ibid., 81.

5. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 205.

6. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 25–26.

7. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 22.

8. Ibid., 21.

9. Ibid., 22.

10. Smith, Oxford History of India, 347.

11. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.

12. Dharwadker, ‘Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representation’.

13. Chakravarty, Tagore Reader, 183.

14. Ibid., 186.

15. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 73.

16. Chakravarty, Tagore Reader, 186.

17. Ibid., 192.

18. Ibid., 193.

19. ‘Nirvak gambhir shanta sanjata udar’. In Tagore's original, the adjectives are not separated by commas.

20. Chakravarty, Tagore Reader, 192–3.

21. Tagore, Rabindra Racanabali, Vol. 24, 317–20.

22. Chakravarty, Tagore Reader, 193.

23. Ibid., 193–4.

24. Ibid., 194.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 194–5.

27. Ibid., 195.

28. Ibid., 196.

29. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 55.

30. Ibid., 55.

31. Tagore, Nationalism, 26–7.

32. Nehru, Discovery of India, 373.

33. Bhattacharya, Mahatma and the Poet, 203–4.

34. Ibid., 205.