When Was India a Nation? (A Study of the Evolution of India's Nationhood Through Ages)

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When was India a nation? This is a question that has puzzled many a contemplative mind over generations. The present book is an exercise to be in the nearest approach to its answer. India had never experienced a nation state in the past any time in the pre British era of Indian history. What we come to know as Bharatavarsha in ancient period was, according to the Vishnupurana, a territory bound by the Himalayas in the north the seas in the south. This sense of territoriality was absent in the middle ages when the concept of Bharatavarsha was metamorphosed into the expression Hindustan. With a sharp religious connotation this expression lost its emphasis on territoriality so that when the country passed under the sway of the English a new nomenclature, India, had to be evolved for all practical purposes. Acivil society with the rule of law and the public opinion as the major instrument of civil life became the hallmark of a nation. The cohesion through one governance, with English as the one lingua franca and with one system of education prevailing over the whole country a new nation emerged in India. How this idea of nationhood worked through various phases of its existence, through famines and movements, through politics and revolutions, through ideologies and social ethics has been studied in the book. This is not a final study of an intricate subject. It is only an effort to move the stalemate in the academic approach to the study of Indian nationhood. In this sense the first and the last inclination of the book is humility in which adventure has been ruled out in all practical purposes.

Ranjit Sen M.A., Ph.D., D.Litt. (RBU & JU) was the Professor and Head, Department of Islamic History and Culture, University of Calcutta. A prolific writer and an author of many titles he is the biographer of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) having chronicled two volumes under the titles Birth of a Colonial City Calcutta and Calcutta Through Colonial Transition. His book The Twin in the Twist: Bose and Gandhi has established him as the frontier historian of India's Freedom Movement. His concern for marginal men has led him to unusual fields of research. An outcome of this is his book Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary Resistance 1757- 1793. In course of fifty-one years of post-graduate history teaching he was connected with various universities in India and lectured south Asian studies abroad. Indology is his current field of research.

The origin of this book is founded on my desire to know Indian nationhood in its historical perspectives as well as in the perspective of India's freedom movement. It is a tragedy writ large in the psychology of Indian nation that in spite of her composite nationality sustained through ages she could not maintain her akhand (undivided) character at the time of independence in 1947. It will be idle to say that Muslim separatism was responsible for that. The period of Hindu Muslim living together spans nearly a millennium. Yet when the moment came when history demanded a fratricidal solidarity the two communities fell apart. The Hindus were arrogant with their non-accommodative posture towards the Muslims while the latter were adamant in their determination not to give up their philosophy of political dichotomy ingrained in their two-nation theory. This produced what was inevitable: the two robust humanities of India after having lived together for ages decided to partition the country and become separate as two sovereign nations. With pangs of despised love we said good-bye to each other. With tears of remorse in our eyes we now recall our tragic failure of the past. A nation's history is its memory. Our memory is a reminiscence of a pitiless misery that we could not overcome. Bengal was partitioned. So was the Punjab. As a Bengali I lost my ancestral home which was in Dhaka, erstwhile East Pakistan, now in Bangladesh. The memory of my lost home was never absent from my mind ever since my childhood. As I grew up I started reading the varied aspects of India's nationhood and under compulsive pressure of emotion I started writing about India's freedom movement. The result was a series of books that I could write both in English and Bengali on India's history and culture, society and religion. The present book is the last in the series. Hard research and translucent sentiment merged to form the core of this book.

The question of attaining a 'nationhood' in India has perennially engaged the attention of many scholars and thinkers across all academic and intellectual divides in this country as well as abroad. The author of the present book Professor Ranjit Sen, an eminent historian, got seriously inclined for a deeper introspection on this subject of study being personally affected with a shock of horror of partition of this country along a distinct religious axiom. Thus came the fractured freedom of India seventy-five years back from now with all pains and pangs consequentially absorbed. His inner impulsive self, like many others, haunted him since then to ultimately take up this basic question of evolving the social formation over a length of time beginning with the conventional historical phases, namely ancient, medieval, and modern contexts. He is by and large convinced in his arguments that the concept of Bharat or Bharatbarsha more or less captured the reality of a prevailing territorial integrity which could encapsulate a conceivable spectrum of defining the notion of 'nation' in India. He further emphatically asserts that this reality, primarily based on Hindu spiritual overtone was substantially shattered by the encroaching and emboldened Muslim rule that took over during the medieval period. As a result the earlier Bharatbarsha as a conceptual category was distinctly replaced in the cartographic representation as Hindustan with various alien connectivities over its pristine pre-existence. During the modern times the changing process of this social formation has passed by a series of differential impacts generated through the various shades of freedom movements for independence, colonial initiatives for various divisive measures including population enumeration etc. During post-independence period numerous constitutional provisions and government policies, starting from various reservations of entitlements, empowerments, state re-organisations based on language affiliations, social and economic weakness or inadequacies etc, also impacted this continuous process of social formation leading largely to the ever growing concept of 'NATION'.

Nation-building is a tricky problem of Indian history. Historians do not know as to when the process of nation-building started in India and how. Bharatarsha was the earliest concept of territoriality Indians knew as an alias of nation. But that did not make any cohesion for a proper nation as such. Plurality in religion, ethnic multiplicity and linguistic diversity had never been streamlined into a homogeneous singular unit that could be called a nation. The process of empire-building had been a very ancient phenomenon in India. But all empires in India brought territorial integration and administrative unity as ingredients of a general pattern of a collective existence. But never in India was there a moment when all mankind was held in one spiritual bond that could serve as the basis of a nation. In ancient India Hinduism could provide one spiritual roof but it could not resist sectarian divisions within itself. Buddhism and Jainism emerged as protest religions and grew as separate faiths. Yet they could not and did not challenge the collective wholeness of the concept of Bharatvarsha as an indivisible unit of a territorially settled mankind. the coming of Islam in India the idea of Bharatvarsha was substituted by the concept of Hindustan. The territorial oneness of the country remained intact but the cosmopolitan broadness of the plural society was lost. Demographic minority the Muslim rulers found themselves in a sea of idolatrous humanity surrounding them. They could not identify themselves with the indigenous people of the land. This had led to two-fold paradoxes. They did not go back to their countries of origin - the lands where they came from. Once in Hindustan, they settled here and did not cease calling themselves Indians. Thus they built up entitlement to their own habitation in this country. But since they could not identify themselves with the majority mankind, the idolatrous people here, they always had maintained a psychological attachment to their original homelands. Rooted here physically they perennially had a spiritual flight to distant lands where they could locate their ancestral homes. This was a split in existence which the Indian Muslims could never get rid of. Out of this emerged the two-nation theory of the nineteenth and twentieth century which originating with Sir Syed Ahmed Khan blossomed into maturity under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. There was a second paradox with the Muslim rule in India. All the conquests they made here was done with the assistance of the indigenous people, particularly the Hindus. It was from the same human stock that men were drawn to fill the administration. In many areas as in Bengal the local population adapted themselves to Islamic culture, court etiquettes and Islamic lingua franca - Arabic and also Persian in later years. The Muslim Sultans in Bengal in the early years had contributed much to the promotion of Bengali language and Bengal's religious culture: vaishnavism. Yet when in the twentieth century time called for a unity between the two communities both the communities fell apart. This was another paradox. It was a standard argument for those who advocated the two-nation theory that the Hindus being a numerical majority functioned on majoritarian ego. But once the Muslims were majority in one part of India they acted on the same psychology and refused to be one with the minority, the Hindu Bengalis, there. In east Bengal the cultivators were mostly Muslims while the zamindars were mostly Hindus. Here the class war between the peasants and the zamindars was whipped up by the Krishak-Praja-Party of Sher-E-Bangla Fazlul Huq who, after the election of 1937, invited the Muslim League to form a coalition ministry in Bengal. Once the Muslim League got foothold in a Muslim dominated territory in the eastern part of India the two-nation theory got its field of application. The Congress agenda for secular India and Akhand Bharat were defeated. History now changed its course. It was now directed to a prospective partition as a substitute for united nation.