On August 29, 1947, just after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Bande Mataram was sung in a prayer meeting in Calcutta. All Hindu and Muslim leaders on the dais stood up to show respect, including the much-maligned Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy. But one person remained seated. He believed that standing for a national song was a western custom. He was none other than Mahatma Gandhi. One wonders what present day ‘nationalists’ would make of this, especially after the recent Supreme Court ruling that made playing of the national anthem compulsory in movie halls.

Sugata Bose, historian and Trinamool Congress MP, mentions of the 1947 incident twice in The Nation as Mother , signifying how some national leaders had envisioned India in diverse ways. The collection includes scholarly essays, a couple of book reviews and six speeches Bose delivered in the Lok Sabha. Bose starts out by dissecting the idea of nationalism and its often tortured and tortuous journey in India over the last 200 years. The triumph of Indian independence came with the pain of partition.

In the first essay ‘The Nation as Mother’, Bose talks about the editorial that appeared in the Bengali daily Millat in the backdrop of partition, which accused, “the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha of performing the role of Parashuram as they together raised the pickaxe to slice Mother into two”.

Bose describes in detail how Bengali intellectuals starting from Bankim, Aurobindo, Bipin Chandra Pal and Tagore invoked the idea of the nation as mother and Abanindranath Tagore’s evocative painting Bharatmata, which forms the cover design of the book, was used to fire nationalist thought among the people. Also how ‘the mother had been’ (reference to a golden age) and ‘what the mother has been reduced to’ (reference to its present servile state) was a powerful image that fired nationalist zeal.

Bose is critical of historians who have argued that colonial thought or knowledge was reduced to a status of ‘derivative discourse’ or a pale imitation of western national thought. Bose argues that, “in analysing nationalist thought it may be best to abandon any ahistorical quest for indigenous authenticity”. He says that, “the nineteenth century colonial encounter was a messy historical process, which inevitably imparted a measure of imbrication to the domains of nationalist thought and colonial knowledge whether in terms of their content or form”.

On Bande Mataram Bose has an interesting essay on the ‘Bande Mataram’ controversy where he says that Bankim’s novel Anandmath , in which the song originally appeared, “was dripping with anti-Muslim prejudice”. He argues that Bankim’s views on Muslims were not shared by other Bengali intellectuals such as Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo who had a more “positive assessment of Islam”.

For Aurobindo the Mughal empire was a “great and magnificent construction” which was “infinitely more tolerant in religion than any medieval or contemporary European kingdom”. The Bande Mataram controversy came to the fore in 1937 and “the question was whether the song should be performed as a national anthem at Congress gatherings”. Jawaharlal Nehru took the help of Subhash Chandra Bose who approached Tagore for advice.

Tagore understood why Muslims and other minority communities might have a problem with it and suggested that the first part “stood on its own and had an inspirational quality which was not offensive to any religious community”. The Congress accepted Tagore’s advice. Since the issue of Bande Mataram has a present day resonance can a similar compromise be reached on it today?

In another essay on Aurobindo, Bose makes a sympathetic reading of his political and spiritual thought and is critical of secular historians for giving Aurobindo the taint of Hindu communalism. Bose is against majoritarianism of both kinds – Hindu and secular. He is critical of secular historians for their “remarkable failure of intellect... in dealing with the question of religion in public life”.

Though Bose doesn’t let off Jinnah lightly, he is unsparing in his criticism of the Congress and Hindu Mahasabha for their role in partition. On Jinnah, Bose’s views are similar to that of Pakistani-American Historian Ayesha Jalal, in that Jinnah till the last minute held the demand for Pakistan as a bargaining chip with the Congress for a more federated post colonial India.

Lust for power To Bose, Congress’ volte face on partition in the last minute was more due to its lust for power at the centre and a “monolithic concept of sovereignty borrowed for modern Europe, denying, multiple identities and several-layered sovereignties that had been its complex legacy from its pre-colonial past”.

In another essay, Bose describes how Sarat Chandra Bose (brother of Netaji) with the help of Gandhiji made a vain, last ditch attempt to keep Bengal united, and how he was let down by the Congress leadership.

The essay ‘Unity or Partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s last stand 1945-48’ is the most moving one in this collection, where he talks about the last few weeks Gandhiji spent in the communal cauldron of Bengal during the run-up to independence. Bose laments about the fact that how Netaji’s successful attempts at forging communal harmony in the INA movement was quickly dissipated in 1947, when the Congress leadership started eyeing power at the Centre. For the Congress, “Partition seemed to be the price worth paying for untrammeled power at a strong centre”.

Most of the issues discussed by Bose in these essays find a resonance even today, 70 years after independence. Had India adopted a more federal set up, as suggested in CR Das’s blueprint, would Partition and ethnic cleansing, have been avoided?

MEET THE AUTHOR

Sugata Boseteaches history at Harvard University. He was a professor of history and diplomacy at Tufts University. Bose, who is Netaji’s brother Sarat Chandra Bose’s grandson, is the author of many books, including Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital and Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire.

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