Book Review | Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings

Book: ‘Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings’
Author: S Irfan Habib
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 296 
Price: Rs 499

If the time that we live in was to have a leitmotif, then it is the recurrent tests of nationalism that Indians are being subjected to as a wave of frenzied nationalism grips society. Don’t stand up in the theatre during the National Anthem? Anti-national. Dare speak against government's policies? Anti-national. Dare eat beef? Anti-national.

This book conveys eminent historian S Irfan Habib’s seething anger over these distortions of the idea of nationalism. He elucidates not just the different kinds of nationalistic ideas that have been fashionable in India in the past, but also traces the trajectory of the current wave of nationalistic fervour. Interestingly, he doesn’t engage with Veer Savarkar and MS Golwalkar, the ideological founts of the Hindu right, rejecting their claims as nationalists and reasoning that their philosophy was communalism. 

Instead, Habib takes us through the nationalism of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gngadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal – Lal-Bal-Pal, as they were called. The trio represented different gradients of Hindu nationalism that was concerned with raising a national consciousness to combat the British. As Pal eloquently said, “Under the Moslems (rulers) we had…one common government, but that did not destroy the integrity of Hindu culture. We took many things from our Mahommedan neighbours, and gave them also something of our own, but this interchange of ideas and institutions did not destroy our special character or our special culture. And that special character and culture is the very soul and essence of what we now understand as nationalism.” 

Habib also delves into the dialectic that surrounds the Islamic nationalism of Muhammad Iqbal, credited with formulating the ideas underlying the movement for a separate Pakistan, and Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani of the Deoband seminary, who was more conciliatory. At the heart of their exchanges is the competing claims of a nation versus that of Islam.

The nationalist ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi also find place in this book, which at 268 pages, is a quick read, even though it tilts a bit on the academic side.