We are living through the time of hyper-nationalism. Why we are talking this today because we are living in nationalism around us and that is one major reason why we are to talking about it as we have so entrapped in this whole idea of nationalism which became part of our everyday life,” asserted S.Irfan Habib, Historian of Science & Modern Political History.
He was recording his lecture on the evolution of nationalism with a theme “Nationalism: Then and Now” as part of a public lecture series being rolled out with a theme of “Reimaging India.”
For us, he said, nation and nationalism are not really new for us. It has been part of our legacy. We inherited the sole idea of nationalism and the idea of Indian nationhood from our freedom struggle. Most of our great nationalist forefathers spent much of their lifetime of 100 years defining this nationalism for us. This nationalism remained almost intrinsic to our growing up years even after independence. However, today there has been something different that we have been forced to actually go back to nationalism.
“We don’t think we need to be such great nationalists after independence because nationalism for us was a tool to fight against the colonial oppressors and our forefathers did their best. All of us need to remember them because for us nationalism is not something which we have created for ourselves. It was something which was passed down to us by people who are better thinkers, who thought about India better than us, who understood India better than us, who understood Indian society better than us. So I think we need to go back to them when we think about the nation and that’s what I am going to do with you today,” he stated.
“We see that there are few names which are floated today in our society and thrown at us by certain political leaders in power. They think by using their names they can somehow get some mileage, some footage but their agenda is nakedly clear,” quipped the historian.
The names they use include Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Moulana Azad, Gandhi and Ambedkar all the time however, he said, you cannot just talk or think about them. You have to understand them. You have to think what these people stood for, what were their ideals, what was the legacy they left behind. What was the idea of Nation and Nationalism they perceived for us and left behind for us in their writings, in their statements in their political speeches and in various ways they tried to convey the idea of India.
“We need to understand the idea of nationalism. Actually is not something which we created for ourselves. This is something which was imported from Europe in 19th century. It was needed by Europe in those times that was made use of by Germany, Italy, France and other countries. While doing that they got into different modes. They forgot about nationalism, they fought around nationalist ideas for years and later on they got out of it because they used it to the maximum,” he explained.
“They fought war in the name of nationalism in World War-I, Second World-II and so many other things happened,” he said adding that “Now, that nationalism, the whole idea of Nationhood passed on to us by the British, by the Europeans, by the European experiences.”
Recalling the words of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he said, the icon of Indian Nationalism wrote, not once but several times, that ‘Nationalism is not an Indian idea.’ Nationalism we imported from abroad more precisely from Europe and we have to make use of that idea for our own struggle against colonial oppression, which we did.
While arguing that the sole idea that India was a nation for centuries and India had been a nation for centuries is actually a bogus perception, he said, “People like Lala Lajpat Rai, who wrote extensively on this, were wrong on this premise because one has to understand what sort of India we were, how divided we were and the sole idea of nationhood was a very burdened and a very imported idea. That is something which we need to keep in mind.”
When this idea comes to India, in the late 19 century onward, there are people like Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhle, Surender Nath Banerjee and Bipin Chandrapal start talking about this and all of these people actually began the sole idea of Indian Nation and Nationhood. “All of them define nationalism in their own way. Many of them use their religion to define it but in a very positive way. Positive means in such a way that they never use religion to exclude any native people or religion,” argued S.Irfan Habib.
