Competing Nationalisms: The Sacred and Political Life of Jagat Narain Lal

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Competing Nationalisms is more than a political biography of Jagat Narain Lal-now forgotten by history, but once an influential member of the freedom movement in Bihar. As a member of the Congress and of the Hindu Mahasabha; as a Hindu nationalist who wanted to combine religion with civic virtues; as a Gandhian and an 'ascetic nationalist' seeking freedom in a political world, Jagat Narain Lal's life becomes a mirror for the times in which a mix of religiosity, spirituality and ritual could not be separated from either the social or the political field.
The book travels with Jagat Narain Lal on his journey through four pathways-Ascetic, Hindu Nationalist, Anti-Colonial and Civic nationalisms. His life and times give us a glimpse into these intersecting, contesting and mutating idioms of nationalism. There are bigger leaders, taller nationalists, more valiant fighters of freedom, but none who perhaps so tortuously embodied the many possibilities and contradictions of Indian nationalism. In his anxieties, vulnerability, negotiations and truth-telling, we glimpse Indian nationalism's own fraught relationship with questions of identity, faith and nationhood.
In leafing through her grandfather's life, page by yellowed page, Chandra presents not just his political biography but, in a sense, a personal biography of Indian nationalism as well. In Jagat Narain Lal's small story lies a bigger history of competing nationalisms, as well as a tale that speaks to the present.

Rajshree Chandra is an academic, a teacher and an author. Most of her writing and research primarily at the of political philosophy, law and politics. She is the author of The Cunning of Rights (2016) and Knowledge as Property (2010) and has written several research articles and political commentaries. Chandra has received the UKERI (UK-India Research Initiative) award for research collaboration, the ICSSR post-doctoral award, the Australia India Institute's ELF fellowship and the IWM (Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna) visiting fellowship. This book-a political biography of her grandfather, rendered through the prism of nationalist history-has been generously supported by the New India Foundation Fellowship.
Rajshree Chandra is professor of political science at Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, and is a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.

Most biographies are about men or women who loom large and who have impacted the course of history significantly, if not single-handedly. This one though is a story of a man who was a participant in history, albeit to an extent that he literally embodied and personified it. It would be fair to say that the main protagonist of this story, Jagat Narain Lal, my paternal grandfather, is 'history in person'. He stands as his own evidence of a person continuously engaged with the nationalist context and practice, charting pathways, shaping and being shaped by new possibilities for the self and the nation.
Jagat Narain Lal was, in Pierre Bourdieu's words, a 'collective individual' who cannot be summarized in a single narrative or viewed through a single ideological lens. Each of the political choices he made, pathways he walked, goals he upheld, is a chronicle of the conflicted life of nationalism.