Understanding Nationalism
When one of the earliest martyrs of India’s freedom struggle, Khudiram Bose, embraced the hangman’s noose, his countrymen bid him farewell and sang ‘Hansi Hansi Porbo Phansi, Dekhbe Mor Deshbashi’ (my countrymen will watch me as I go to the gallows with a smile on my face). Bhagat Singh’s call of ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ inspired a whole generation to resist British rule in India. They rose up as one against the inhumanity heaped on Indians by the then mightiest imperial power, with Bhagat Singh’s words ringing in their ears: ‘The sanctity of Law can be maintained only so long as it is the expression of the will of the people’. The youth of India joined the struggle against British Colonialism remembering Chandrashekhar Azad’s immortal words: ‘If yet your blood does not rage, then it is water that flows in your veins. For what is the flush of youth, if it is not of service to the motherland’. When young Indian ratings in service in the British Navy turned the guns on their ships towards the Bombay harbour, workers across India downed their tools in solidarity. Our struggle for freedom united the entire country, chasing a dream that had to become a reality. In the words of the poet-revolutionary Ashfaqullah Khan ‘There is no dream, and if there is, there is only one to see you my children struggling for the same and for which I am expected to be finished’.
While the dream of a free India united its people against colonial rule, it was not a dream in just one colour. The rise of Indian nationalism under colonial rule was not just about freeing our land, it went much beyond. Indian nationalism was imbued with the colours of the rainbow, where the dreams of people who inhabited the land converged into a vision that was to become the vision for India – free, proud, fully in control if its own destiny as an independent nation. A nation that would have place for all – women and men, poor and rich, workers and peasants, people of all faiths, indivisible as a nation beyond caste, religion and gender. The rise of Indian nationalism was also a struggle to free its entire people from shackles that prevented them from leading lives that were free of exploitation and injustice. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, the dream was of an India awakening in a land “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments, By narrow domestic walls”. Note how Tagore’s vision of the Indian nation is not just about its territory, it is also about social justice and dignity, about freedom to acquire knowledge, and about respect for all communities and nations.
The bedrock of Indian Nationalism was, thus, freedom from exploitation in any form – in Gandhiji’s words: ‘Our nationalism can be no peril to other nations in as much as we will exploit none, just as we will allow none to exploit us’. Gandhiji here, was already demarcating the idea of Indian nationalism from that of imperial nations of that time like Britain, when he said: “It is not nationalism that is evil, it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil”. Babasaheb Ambedkar further argued forcefully that nationalism can be an empty slogan if it does not include the emancipation of those who are most exploited. He argued that: “…it may be possible to consider a nation as a unit but sociologically, it cannot be regarded as consisting of many classes. Freedom of the nation, if it is to be a reality, must vouchsafe the freedom of the different classes comprised in it, particularly of those who are treated as the servile classes”. Sarojini Naidu declaimed in the same vein: “Until you have acquired and mastered the spirit of brotherhood, do not believe it possible that you will ever cease to be sectarian... you will ever be national”.
This, then, was the larger vision of a free India, a nation free of exploitation by foreign powers on one hand and one where all efforts would converge to guarantee social, economic, and political freedom
and justice to its entire people. Not just a nationalism that defends the physical boundaries of the nation but one that raises its voice against injustice and exploitation within society.
It is important, at the same time, to remember that the broader vision of Indian nationalism which incorporated the idea of freedom in all its dimensions for the entire people, did come into conflict with a much narrower idea of nationalism that was based on religious or ethnic identity. During our struggle for independence, the struggle against the British played a very important role in developing our ideas of nation and nationality. But during this period of our history the above two contrasting ideas about the Indian nation were advanced. Let us explore, first, the roots of these very different ideas, which lie in eighteenth century Europe.
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