View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by AIR Universita degli studi di Milano Elena Valdameri Department of Historical Studies State University of Milan [email protected] Foundations of Gokhale’s Nationalism Between Nation and Empire !1 CONTENTS PREFACE …………………………………………………………………………………..3 INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………….8 THE EMERGENCE OF INDIAN NATIONALISM……………………………………………..47 GOKHALE’S IDEA OF THE NATION. BETWEEN NATION AND EMPIRE……………….119 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………..205 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………..208 !2 FOREWORD I began this research with the purport to analyse the idea of the nation elaborated by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), an Indian intellectual and prominent leader of the Indian National Congress from 1901 until his premature death. However, the final outcome of my work turned out to be rather different from what I had expected. It will be seen that Gokhale’s conceptualisation of the nation has been dealt with mainly in the last section of this study, though there are references in earlier sections, when ideas of the other leaders of the Indian nationalist movement are taken into consideration. As a matter of fact, several important issues, without which the analysis of Gokhale’s ideology would have been incomplete, if not incomprehensible, have taken up more space than I thought: I hope my decision to pay more attention to the context will help the reader understand the complexity of the historical period in question. In particular, I made special reference to the influence of European ideas on Indian intellectuals and how these were able to blend the old and the new in a creative process of synthesis. Indian liberalism, the theorisation of modernity, and the conceptualisation of the nation in the modern meaning of the term were all by-products of this process. This challenges the argument that the making of modern India was the result of the mechanical application of ‘Western’ values and models. It also disputes the logical consequence of this argument, id est, that Indians had no historical agency, but were only passively appropriating what the British rulers over-imposed. Moreover, I have taken into account some aspects of the political thought of the most relevant leaders of the Indian anti-colonial movement, inside and outside the Indian National Congress, in order to reconstruct the intellectual debate in which Gokhale was involved. What appears is that, since the beginning, Indian nationalism was never homogenous. It will be seen that the anti-colonial movement was made up with several voices, often diverging, which advocated different concepts of freedom and were more or less in favour of, if not against, a just social order for the nation in the making. Thus, I suggest that it might be better to speak of an anti-colonial movement, since this term helps deconstructing the impression, created ex post by the Indian nationalist historiography, of nationalism as a monolithic and uniform phenomenon, whereas it was internally much diversified; in certain cases, it opposed Indians - Muslims, Dalits, women and the !3 economically underprivileged - more than the British rulers. In studying this movement, the context of Maharashtra, namely the region from where Gokhale hailed, has been taken into consideration in order to explain how certain questions were transferred from the political regional stage to the national one: also the contradiction between cultural and political nationalism that characterised the Maharashtrian political discourse from 1870s reached the all-Indian political fore, as the context between Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gokhale shows. Let us now turn our attention to Gokhale in order to briefly introduce what I have attempted to investigate in the course of this work. Gokhale is a pivotal figure in the political history of India, because he was one of the first intellectuals and politicians to frame a modern and secular concept of the nation and to use the platform of the Indian National Congress to familiarise Indians with that same concept. Gokhale elaborated a liberal and political nationalist ideology, in which the existence of the modern state was the precondition for the building of the nation. The nation, in fact, was defined by the enjoyment of political and civic rights. So, thanks to the policies of the British Raj, India - a geographical and cultural unity - had also become a political unity and all Indians had been unified under the same polity. In Gokhale’s political discourse, Indians, being subjects of the British Crown, were entitled to citizenship rights: that is why Gokhale did not want India to get rid of the British connection; rather, he aspired to the status of dominion for the British colony. For this reason, he asked for increasing Indian participation in the colonial administration, since he regarded self-government as an essential precondition to steadily instil into the Indian people a sense of common good and belonging to the same nation. In this sense, the continuance of the British Raj, although progressively Indianised, would contribute to keep together the nation, while religion, caste and community divisions would become irrelevant under the wider national consciousness. By and large, Gokhale’s nationalism advocated the amelioration of India’s economic and social structure and admitted the possibility of using the colonial agency to create a juster society. Freedom for the nation was not exclusively freedom from the foreigner, but from any kind of injustice, regardless of the fact that it was an Indian or a British to perpetrate it. The nation was to be built in the future and the common progress that lay ahead was one of its binding factors. Since his nationalism was universalist and never anti-British, Gokhale was often belittled and called a collaborator of the British rulers by his contemporaries, Tilak in primis. In the same way, Indian historiography, especially the nationalist one, has judged Gokhale’s and !4 Tilak’s respective thoughts and actions more from the perspective of the coloniser- colonised opposition, rather than taking into consideration the nation they were envisioning. Tilak, then, emerges as the most uncompromising and heroic champion of the freedom struggle of the time, even though caste and gender disabilities were the mainstay of his nationalism. So, my work wants to be a contribution - although far from being exhaustive - to the comprehension of Gokhale’s idea of the nation, beyond the contradiction between colonised and coloniser. I hope that the analysis of the Gokhalean conceptualisation of the nation will help to bring the deserved attention to the central role attributed by the Congress leader to internal freedom and equality. Unfortunately, due to the paucity of time, I could not deal with the relationship between Gokhale and Gandhi. Notwithstanding the fact that Gandhi regarded Gokhale as his political guru, I believe that what the two had in common is much less than what is generally understood. In fact, a preliminary investigation into the matter has convinced me that differences, rather than similarities, stand out between Gokhale and Gandhi. The most evident shared aspect is the emphasis both gave to moral and ethics in handling political situations, namely the so-called spiritualisation of politics, the priority of the means over the end. Moreover, if Gandhi upheld Gokhale’s secularism and, like the latter, maintained that all Indians were members of the nation irrespective of their creed, the Mahatma took an ambivalent stand as far as the institution of caste was concerned. By adopting (Hindu) religious symbols and by mobilising the masses around religious questions, like, for instance, the Khilafat movement, Gandhi left behind Gokhale’s teachings and contributed to insert religious elements in Indian politics. However, I hope that, in the near future, I will have a chance to look into the elements of continuity and change between these two pivotal figures of Indian history. Let me just conclude with a few words on the sources I have used to carry out this research. I spent the most part of my field-work period in New Delhi, where I could consult a great deal of material, both unpublished and published primary sources, but also secondary sources to which I could not have been able to have access in Italy. The most important sources for the analysis of the idea of the nation have certainly been Gokhale’s Private Papers and the collection of the Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Gokhale’s Papers, kept in the National Archives of India, is a valuable collection, from which I could see Gokhale’s vision outside the public official discourse; the perception that Gokhale had of the other leaders of the Congress and of the anti-colonial movement; his concerns about painful and complex issues such as the Hindu-Muslim question or the !5 terrible conditions of Indian indentured labourers in South Africa. Nevertheless, it is the Speeches and Writings that were of particular relevance, because it is in the public discourse that a certain concept of the nation is circulated and given authoritative voice. Besides these two fundamental groups of sources, I have used numerous private papers and newspapers of the time to see how Gokhale’s nationalism was received in the public sphere and which were the reactions to it. Since I do not know Marathi, the primary sources I have used are exclusively in English. However, majority of the documents among Gokhale’s papers are in English. In fact, during the period in question, the elite had already adopted the English language as lingua franca. This work could not have been possible without the encouragement and guidance of Prof. Michelguglielmo Torri. I have immensely benefited from his unprecedented knowledge of Indian history, his countless advices, his invaluable insights, his patience and time. For all this, I first and foremost would like to thank him.