Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Ananya Vajpeyi
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0674048954
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What India's founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India's own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought.
Taking five of the most important founding figures-Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar-Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India's founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence.
Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India's struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.
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Of praxis is the myth that the world may be shaped by the human will; Rabindranath, giving voice to a poiesis that belongs to Kalidasa, to the Yak}a, to Rabindranath himself, and to all mankind, does not subscribe to the myth of praxis.54 He believes only in the truth of poiesis. Many years ago, Isaiah Berlin saw the value in Tagore’s unique position: Indians, he wrote, ought to be proud of “the rarest of all gifts of nature, a poet of genius, who, even in moments of acute crisis . . .
The British defeated Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1857–1858 and symbolically took over the court of the Mughals. The Delhi Durbar of 1903 marked the coronation of Edward VII as emperor of India. Abanindranath’s works, displayed on this occasion, should have read like an ironic commentary on the evanescence of power and on the pathos of mortality that affl icts all human endeavor, even the greatest architectural project of one of the most powerful monarchs ever to rule India. In A b a n i n d r a n a t.
Uncle’s repeated engagement with the Yak}a, and ultimately evidence of Rabindranath’s success in transforming or translating this figure from classical Sanskrit literature into a modern poetic symbol. As Guha-Thakurta shows, Abanindranath’s entire theory turned on the spiritual force and symbolic power of Indian art, and the Yak}a, drawn from Kalidasa via Rabindranath, no doubt served as an appropriate vehicle for his idea of a native, and national, aesthetics. Abanindranath’s painting is.
Course, and the Bengal School was no longer the cutting edge of the Indian artistic renaissance as it had once been. Rabindranath painted thousands of works in his sixties and seventies, deeply interested in, curious about, and open to trends in modernist art around the globe— Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Bauhaus, and Primitivism, most prominently. He also paid close attention to the mask-making and other premodern ritual arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Native Americans. His radar as a painter.
In the same historical formation, the Mauryan imperium, which displays all of the complexity that characterizes the relationship between tradition and modernity for the founders—it is a temporally [ 171 ] J a w a h a r l a l N e h r u remote moment of a political nature in Indic antiquity; it comes to life, as it were, through colonial philology, archaeology, and art history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it appears to be a repository of norms and values that can be.