Modern Asian Studies http://journals.cambridge.org/ASS Additional services for Modern Asian Studies: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Secularizing the Sacred, Imagining the Nation- Space: The Himalaya in Bengali travelogues, 1856–1901 SANDEEP BANERJEE and SUBHO BASU Modern Asian Studies / Volume 49 / Issue 03 / May 2015, pp 609 - 649 DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X13000589, Published online: 29 September 2014 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X13000589 How to cite this article: SANDEEP BANERJEE and SUBHO BASU (2015). Secularizing the Sacred, Imagining the Nation-Space: The Himalaya in Bengali travelogues, 1856–1901. Modern Asian Studies, 49, pp 609-649 doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000589 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ASS, IP address: 132.174.254.12 on 06 May 2015 Modern Asian Studies 49, 3 (2015) pp. 609–649. C Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000589 First published online 29 September 2014 Secularizing the Sacred, Imagining the Nation-Space: The Himalaya in Bengali travelogues, 1856–1901∗ SANDEEP BANERJEE Department of English, McGill University, Canada Email: [email protected] SUBHO BASU Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Canada Email: [email protected] Abstract This article examines changing conceptions of the Himalaya in nineteenth- century Bengali travelogues from that of a sacred space to a spatial metaphor of a putative nation-space. It examines sections of Devendranath Tagore’s autobiography, written around 1856–58, before discussing the travelogues of Jaladhar Sen and Ramananda Bharati from the closing years of the nineteenth century. The article argues that for Tagore the mountains are the ‘holy lands of Brahma’, while Sen and Bharati depict the Himalaya with a political slant and secularize the space of Hindu sacred geography. It contends that this process of secularization posits Hinduism as the civil religion of India. The article further argues that the later writers make a distinction between the idea of a ‘homeland’ and a ‘nation’. Unlike in Europe, where the ideas of homeland and nation overlap, these writers imagined the Indian nation-space as one that encompassed diverse ethno-linguistic homelands. It contends that the putative nation-space articulates the hegemony of the Anglo-vernacular middle classes, that is, English educated, upper caste, male Hindus where women, non-Hindus, and the labouring classes are marginalized. ∗ Previous versions of this article were presented at the South Asia Center of Syracuse University, and at Syracuse University’s History Department Faculty Workshop. The authors especially would like to thank Crystal Bartolovich, Craige Champion, Amlan Das Gupta, Parvathy Binoy, Tanushree Ghosh, and Auritro Majumder for their comments and suggestions. 609 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 06 May 2015 IP address: 132.174.254.12 610 SANDEEP BANERJEE AND SUBHO BASU Introduction In 1893, the Bengali periodical Bharati began the serial publication of a travel account on the Himalaya by Jaladhar Sen. The narrative documented the author’s experiences of travelling in and around the pilgrimage centres in the Garhwal region of the Himalaya from 1890. In 1900, it was published as a travelogue Himalay [The Himalaya]. The following year, in 1901, another Bengali literary magazine Sahitya began to serialize Ramananda Bharati’s Himaranya [The Forests of Snow]. Though Himaranya opens in the Garhwal Himalaya, it primarily describes the author’s journey to Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar, and travels in other parts of Tibet, during 1898. Written in conversational Bengali, Himalay and Himaranya are among the earliest texts of what would, in the next few decades, develop into a vigorous corpus of travel narratives on the Himalaya written by the Bengali bhadralok or middle class. This article focuses on these early bhadralok travel narratives on the Himalaya to delineate how they mark a formal shift from earlier representations of the mountains in Bengali. Importantly, unlike the narratives that precede them, the bhadralok travelogues do not depict the mountains as a liminal space between domesticity and liberation. Neither do they mimic the normative colonial mode of projecting the Himalaya as an environmental frontier between the hot, humid plains and the pristine, untamed nature of the higher altitudes.1 Instead, infusing the sacred Himalayan geography with a secular politics, they explore the dialectical relationship between space and the populace through a political lens. The travelogues foreground their narrators’ Bengali bhadralok identity, articulate their sense of belonging to the ethno-linguistic homeland of Bengal, and repeatedly indicate their sense of being ‘out of place’ in the Himalaya. Not only do the narrators display an acute awareness of their political—that is, colonized—subjectivity as British Indian subjects, but travelling along traditional pilgrim routes through the Himalaya, they also indicate their awareness of Hindu sacred geography. In these travelogues, the Himalaya becomes a space for the dialectical intersection and interpenetration of distinct conceptions of space: the colonial space of British India, as well as the pre-colonial 1 For an elaboration on the idea of the Himalaya as a zone of colonial settlement through the construction of hill stations, see D. Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 06 May 2015 IP address: 132.174.254.12 SECULARIZING THE SACRED 611 notions of the ethno-linguistic homeland of Bengal and Hindu sacred geography. This article argues that these narratives, by projecting the mountains as a space that anchors these distinct spatial conceptions, posit the Himalaya as a spatial metaphor of a national civilization. Indeed, the idea of the Indian nation-space appears as a ‘structure of feeling’.2 For Williams this conceptual category denotes social experience while still in process; it aims to understand social relations and social experiences that are emergent or pre-emergent, before they have been defined, classified, and rationalized.3 These bhadralok travel narratives, then, not only portray the group’s social experience but also their spatial practice, and the attendant production of the Indian nation-space, as process.4 Besides articulating their social experience as changes in presence while being lived, these travelogues simultaneously underline the dialectical interactions (and interpenetrations) between the conceived, perceived, and lived notions of the pre-colonial and colonial spaces of India.5 In addition to highlighting emergent and pre-emergent social relations, the travel narratives also gesture towards—to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase—the secretion of new spaces. Further, by drawing on pre-colonial notions of Hindu sacred geography to project a national space, these texts implicitly ‘secularize’ Hinduism by positing—and naturalizing—it as the civil religion of India. Significantly, such a move projects all other non-Hindu routes of constructing the South Asian homeland as ‘religious’ and therefore non-secular. In effect, this article contends that these travel narratives illuminate the processes through which the Anglo-vernacular Bengali bhadralok class fashioned themselves (and other Anglo-vernacular middle-class groups from British India) as normative citizens of the putative Indian nation-space. In other words, these texts document the socio-spatial project of the colonial Indian middle class—in Bengal, 2 R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 128–135. 3 Ibid, p. 132. 4 While a spatial register is implicit in the conceptual category ‘structure of feeling’, this is most explicit in Williams’ deployment of the term in The Country and the City. See R. Williams, The Country and the City, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973, particularly Chapter 5 ‘Town and Country’. 5 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 38–41. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 06 May 2015 IP address: 132.174.254.12 612 SANDEEP BANERJEE AND SUBHO BASU and elsewhere in India—to claim themselves as the primary subjects of the putative Indian nation.6 It is important to note that travel writings in Bengali existed in pre- colonial times. However, the form of the travelogue (bhraman kahini) emerged in Bengal during the colonial era and was intrinsically tied to the rise of the bhadralok class.7 The travelogues of Jaladhar Sen (1860–1939) and Ramananda Bharati (1836–1901) on the Himalaya were among the earliest by Bengali authors. Other Himalayan travelogues would subsequently follow, transforming and expanding the genre in the course of the twentieth century. For instance, Prabodh Kumar Sanyal (1905–1983) wrote Mahaprasthaner Pathey [In the Footsteps of the Pandavas]andDevatatma Himalay [The Divine- souled Himalaya]. Mahaprasthaner Pathey became immensely popular on publication in 1937, and drew approving reviews from Bengali notables such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, and Subhash Chandra Bose.8 Perhaps the most renowned, and prolific, practitioner of the genre in Bengali was Umaprasad Mukherjee (1903–1997). Among Mukherjee’s copious literary output were accounts of journeys to various parts of the Himalaya in India and travels