The final fulfilment of the Vedantic ideal in politics

Constructing nation as family: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and postnationality Socialist Review, 1999 by Dayal, Samir

The appeal to the past is not, of course, new. H.F. Owen notes that the Nationalist Movement in India may be divided into three periods:

(1) the 1870s-1890s, the period of Moderate pre-eminence, essentially British in its intellectual provenance;

(2) the 1890s-1914: the struggle between the Moderates (like Ram Mohun Roy, Ranade, and Gokhale) and the Extremists; and

(3) 1914-1947: the period of "agitational politics and Gandhi's leadership."

Even before the First World War, as Owen points out, the Extremists were reasserting a pie-British Hindu Indian past. (See H.F. Owen, "The Nationalist Movement," in A Cultural of India, ed. A.L. Basham [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], p. 391). He cites for instance Aurobindo's idea of self-government of India as "'the fulfilment of the ancient life of India under modem conditions' and 'the final fulfilment of the Vedantic ideal in politics' " (cited in Owen, p. 392).

Owen usefully reminds us that in this appeal to the past the Extremists were "the political counterpart to the Hindu revivalist movements of the last third of the nineteenth century, represented by such organizations as the Sanatana Dharma Mahamandal, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, and the Ramakrishna Mission." Particularly important is his observation that both Hindu revivalism and Extremist nationalism were hybrids, springing from Western and indigenous sources.

Their indigenous sources were obvious enough-the conscious turning back to the Vedas, the Gita, and Vedanta; the defence of Hindu ideas and worship against the criticism of missionaries and liberals; the movements to reclaim Hindu converts to Islam and Christianity initiated in the 1890s; the public festivals in honour of the Hindu god, Ganesh, and the Hindu hero-king, Sivaji; and the invocation of the Mother Goddess as an embodiment of both Bengal and India, to be cherished and restored, and as witness to the oaths of patriotic conspiracy (P. 392). However, recent scholarship has challenged Owen's notion that this appeal to the past was merely imitative of Western models.