Prisoners of history: Bengali cultural nationalists and the Hindu past

This dissertation explores the investment of the cultural nationalism of late 19th and early 20th century Bengal in an elite (Hindu) historiography of India. In four chapters that follow the introduction, select writings by four significant figures of Bengali nationalism are examined with particular emphasis on how the specter of the Hindu past haunts their imagining of a future nation. The reading begins, in the second chapter, with essays and key fictional works by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894), the first significant novelist and essayist in the Bengali language. Bankim's symbolic juxtaposition of the nation and the mother-goddess in his novel Anandamath (1882) created the image of 'country as mother,' that influenced most Indian nationalist imaginings that followed. His novels also marked the early consolidation of the 'feeble domesticated woman' with the 'mythically powerful mother-goddess,' thus instituting both the gendered representation of the nation and the woman's position within that nation. The fourth and final chapter is on Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Nobel Laureate poet, novelist, essayist and political activist, who critiqued, subverted and deconstructed most of Bankim's nationalist formulations, and yet adopted many of them in his lifelong political and literary endeavors. The nationalist thought of Bankim and Tagore can be used to map two points in a diachronic progression in the dominant nationalist discourse in 19 th and early 20th century Bengal and India.; The subject of the 3rd and the 4th chapters are two political and/or religious leaders, whose careers cover many important segments of the above diachronic progression---Narendranath Datta (1863-1902) and Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1952). Emphasis has been placed mainly on the contact zone between their rhetoric of spirituality and nationalism.; All four authors chosen for this study were prolific writers, and have exerted influence in varying degrees on literary, political and religious trends and movements in Bengal and India. This study is not in any way an attempt to encompass the significance of their careers and influences in their entirety. The content of this dissertation is limited by the author's interest in their adoption, appropriation, or contest of the perception of 'India' or 'Bharatvarsha' as a homogeneous nation.