Semanti Ghosh
Published: 1999
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One of the principal claims of the nationalist ideology in colonial India was to unite various groups and interests into a singular political and ideological system in order to create a common national platform against the British. However, the nationalist agenda faced a grave dilemma on this count, because the real or perceived elements of 'difference' within the society constantly challenged the ideas of a singular nation-hood. Nationalist discourse and politics, therefore, suffered from the tension between the indivisibility of the national interest on the one hand, and the disparateness of various community, class or caste interests on the other. Focusing mainly on religious differences, my thesis explores this dilemma in the context of Bengali nationalism between the Swadeshi movement (1905) and the Independence and Partition (1947). Through a study of the ideological formulations and political experimentations of the Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus, I show that the nationalist predicament is to be understood in terms of the controversies around the questions of national sovereignty and the principles of representation for a national-democratic society. As a consequence of the contesting ideas on these key issues, there emerged multiple visions of the nation, which continued to negotiate throughout this era. The nation envisaged by C.R. Das, Fazlul Huq, Abul Hashim and many other Bengali political and intellectual leaders was different from the Congress notion of a centralized nation-state of India. The Pakistan movement in Bengal was primarily based on such alternative ideas of the post-colonial state, with a demand for greater decentralization and fair representation of different communities and groups at all levels of the state and society. Central to these alternative nationalisms was a strong sense of regional patriotism, which actually opened up negotiating grounds for resolving the riddles of representation and sovereignty in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century.