Indigenous Modernities: Nationalism and Communalism in Colonial India | Giorgio S HANI

Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies,

2005. ISSN 1347-8214. Vol.4, pp. 87-112


Indigenous Modernities: Nationalism and Communalism in Colonial India

by Giorgio S HANI

In this paper, it is argued that colonial policies facilitated the development of

ethnicized religious communities in South Asia and that, despite the secular

credentials of its leadership, ‘India’ could not help but be imagined by its new

citizens primarily in terms of its ‘Hindu’ ethno-religious traditions. As long as the

nationalist leadership remained committed to a secular vision intelligible in

western terms as the separation of religion and politics, nationalism would remain

an elite phenomenon. The mass based political activism of Mahatma Gandhi,

however, was based upon a mobilisation of the peasant masses through the use of

‘Hindu’ religious symbols. This problematized the relationship between Indian

‘nationalism’ and Hindu ‘communalism’ and created space for the articulation of

first a Muslim and subsequently a Sikh ‘national’ identity.

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/ir/college/bulletin/e-vol4/shani.pdf