Pranab Bardhan at his Substack:
In thinking about the positive basis of nationalism for post-colonial India, Tagore and Gandhi found the nation-state of European history—characterized by a singular social, usually ethnic or linguistic, homogenizing principle, militarized borders and mobilization against ‘enemies’ both external and internal—unacceptable and unsuitable for India’s diverse and heterogeneous society. Their idea of India was not monolithic state-centric, but pluralistic and community- or society-centric.
By the way, the singular social homogenizing principle mentioned above is not just western, it is also one of the basic tenets of Chinese civilization. The sinologist W.J.F Jenner in his book The Tyranny of History describes this basic tenet as ‘that uniformity is inherently desirable, that there should be only one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition’. In contrast, India, particularly in the historical perspective of Tagore, Nehru and their followers, has celebrated the diversity of Indian civilization. The current ruling cultural-political dispensation of RSS-BJP in India wants to displace that idea of India with the homogenizing principle of a Hindu-supremacist nation-state characterized by a ‘one nation, one everything’ motto. Their earlier ideological leaders (particularly Savarkar and Golwalkar) had expressed open admiration for the ‘efficient’ Nazi system of mobilizing and organizing the German nation.
The European scholar of nationalism who has shown the most sensitivity to the socio-cultural particularities in the construction or ‘imagination’ of national consciousness in different parts of the world was Benedict Anderson.
More here.
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