In this inspiring and ambitious work, Ananya Vajpeyi charts out an innovative and fresh path to approach the idea of modern India, one that especially shines because of its ingenuity and simplicity. Vajpeyi begins her work with an acute observation, namely that the “Indian” word “Swaraj,” which denotes freedom, actually contains two parts—swa, translated as self, and raj, meaning rule. Yet in the annals of historiography, discussion has centered only on raj, specifically British colonial rule (pp. ix–x). For Vajpeyi, though, the real question is, “What constitutes India's ‘self’? What is the substance of the ‘swa’ in ‘Swaraj’? When we say ‘India,’ what do we mean?” (p. x). Vajpeyi answers this difficult question by systematically probing the idea of the self—and its political manifestation in an ideal republic—as articulated by some of India's exceptional political leaders of the anticolonial movement, namely, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), and Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–1956). Indeed, such an idea of the self is not given; it has to be unearthed, reconstructed, and crafted, something that Vajpeyi does brilliantly. The project is especially unique because there has been no tradition of thinking about the notion of the self, especially in a political sense, in India. As Vajpeyi reminds us, her work is not like Arendt's, in which a tradition of thinking about the self could be traced from Plato to Marx. Instead, she chose to focus on those Indian thinkers whose thinking was “least exclusionary” and “most capacious.” (p. 11)
In reconstructing this notion of the self, Vajpeyi delves into the familiar as well as less well-known writings (and paintings, in the case of Abanindranath Tagore) of these five political figures and probes their pivotal source of moral imagination as they struggled and sought to restore an idea of the self and an idea of India. Among all of these individuals, Vajpeyi contends that the pursuit of the self could be represented by six categories, namely, ahimsa (or nonviolence, for Gandhi), viraha (or longing, for Rabindranath Tagore), samvega (or aesthetic shock, for Abanindranath Tagore), dharma and artha (or norm and purpose, for Jawaharlal Nehru), and duhkha (or suffering, for Ambedkar). The significance of these categories lies in the fact that they involved a proactive engagement with Indian traditions. In other words, amidst the crisis of identity that colonial modernity brought in its wake, these exceptional leaders were able to traverse the length and breadth of Indian traditions in order to resolve the problem of who they were and to forge a politics that would ultimately lead them to a sovereign state (both of being as well as of the state). Credit goes to Vajpeyi for illuminating the roadmap of the route that these leaders traveled in order to create a new identity based on India's ancient history.
In Gandhi's use of ahimsa, Vajpeyi highlights the fact that though there was a larger presence of the principle of nonviolence in the Jain tradition and in particular the history of the Mauryan Emperor, Asoka, “Gandhi actually gets his ahimsa not from Jainism but from the Bhagavad Gita” (p. 66). Vajpeyi demonstrates that Rabindranath Tagore's engagement with the ancient Indian poet Kalidasa and his poem Meghaduta reveals Tagore's longing for a past that no longer exists. Vajpeyi writes, “The India of the past, then, becomes a place that he loves and from which he is, as a representative of modern man, sundered, perhaps irremediably” (p. 90). Such a longing of the self then translates into an asymmetry between the idea of communities and the idea of the nation-state, thereby articulating one of the earliest critiques of nationalism (p. 93).
In examining Abanindranath Tagore's painting of Shah Jahan and the Taj Mahal, in conjunction with Rabindranath Tagore's work on Kalidasa, Vajpeyi reads a sense of aesthetic shock, and of a moment of self-realization that essentially translates into a “clear and certain knowledge of that which India is in danger of losing and must hold onto, defying the terrific power of colonialism” (p. 157). For Vajpeyi, this shock has to be read in the context of what was clearly a sustained and passionate engagement by the Tagores with Indian traditions and their potential loss in the face of British colonialism.
Vajpeyi depicts Nehru's engagement with India's past through an analysis of his writings on Indian history, on the Mauryan Emperor Asoka and the corresponding symbols of the Indian state that were eventually chosen, and finally Nehru's instructional letters to his chief ministers, which together represented imagining and willing a republic not only as part of history—as a norm—but also as purpose, that of building and maintaining such a republic (pp. 170–71). Finally, for Ambedkar, his conversion to Buddhism, another part of ancient Indian history, represents the burden of the self (duhkha). Vajpeyi argues that “the thread that keeps Ambedkar tied to India, even as he wants to smash India into smithereens and reconstruct it from the ground up, is his abiding commitment to solving the mystery of duhkha, the suffering of the people – not just his people, the Untouchables, but all people, the people of India” (p. 211).
In this way, by carefully illustrating the cartography of ancient Indian history that these five modern Indian leaders traversed in their effort to define the self (swa) and realize political sovereignty (raj), Vajpeyi has given us a compelling argument to rethink the political foundations of modern India. Indeed, Vajpeyi's work convincingly illustrates that India's precolonial past matters as much as its colonial history.
In such a well-written and conceptually innovative book, I find just two critiques worth mentioning, one minor and the other more substantive. As a reader, I would have liked to see the Tagore paintings that are discussed reprinted in the book. Reading Vajpeyi's own interpretation of the paintings would have been a better experience with these visual representations. A substantive problem, however, relates to the asymmetry between the novel framework that the author uses and the reading of the five political individuals involved. Unfortunately, in presenting a compelling case for rethinking India's founding, there is very little by way of rethinking the iconic figures that have been discussed in this book. Thus, Gandhi, the Tagores (arguably, Abanindranath is a new addition to the canon of “founders”), and Nehru still appear as larger-than-life figures whose exceptional capacity to think and to lead the country remains unquestioned. Though Vajpeyi singles out Ambedkar for a critical analysis, the other leaders are discussed in a largely uncritical light. (On Ambedkar, see pp. 230, 234, and 239.) Indeed, a close reading of some of the other texts written by these leaders and the larger corpus of works that were produced during the anticolonial movement could yield an alternative understanding of these leaders. In this context, any “tradition” that is crafted needs to be open to a critical perspective on its canonical thinkers as well, something that is mostly missing in this book.
Clearly, such an ambitious project has to be necessarily collective in the long run, and Vajpeyi's initiative would definitely spur interest in the connections between Indian traditions and modern Indian political life. Vajpeyi's book will thus be of critical interest to historians, political theorists, and anyone who is interested in the debates surrounding the making of modern postcolonial India.
