For our final seminar of 2017, we teamed up with the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) to offer contrasting perspectives on the politics and geography of South Asia. As Rosalind Parr explains in her blog report, these inspired us to think about how European ideas were deployed and manipulated in South Asia during the colonial and postcolonial periods.
The first paper of the evening was given by Nilanjana Mukherjee (Delhi University), who is this year’s Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at IASH. In her paper, ‘From Highlands to Himalayas. The Making of a Borderland,’ she used conceptions of the Himalayas to illustrate how maps, paintings, and travel writing, were languages of power that articulated the colonial project. For the inhabitants of the Himalayas, the mountains represented a central sacred space while, for Europeans, they came to mark a peripheral borderland. The latter reflected conceptions of mountains drawn from the British context, with the Highlands of Scotland providing an important parallel.
This presumed parallel fed into a process whereby the Himalayan landscape was interpreted through the lens of the Scottish tradition. Mukherjee demonstrated how this juxtaposition played out in practice through the work of the Scottish painter, James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856). The ‘view-from-above’ Scottish Enlightenment tropes employed by Fraser in his depictions of the Indian landscape reflected a sense of power and opened up the space for the colonial gaze.
This had far-reaching consequences. In displacing traditional, polycentric conceptions of the space, the colonial regime established a territorial borderland that later became the frontier of the postcolonial state. The idea that mountain ranges represented the heart of the political and spiritual world – a view common in Indian mythology – was gradually displaced by a decidedly European idea of mountains as impenetrable and dangerous liminal spaces.
Our second speaker was Rakesh Ankit (Jindal University, Delhi), who is the inaugural CSMCH-IASH Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. His paper ‘Many Ways of Being One: The Hindu Communist?’ examined the life stories of prominent Indian communists in order to help us understand the history of communism in India.
As Ankit pointed out, the question of whether India was ripe for communism has exercised many a commentator over the years. However, the question of why Communism succeeded or failed has rarely been treated in relation to the biographies of the Communist movement’s key leaders.
As a way of rectifying this balance, Ankit offered quickfire biographies of eight founding fathers of the Indian Communist movement: Sachidanand Vishnu Ghate (1896-1970), Gangardhar Adhikari (1898-1981), S.A. Dange (1899-1991), P. Sundarayya (1913-1985), M. Basavapunniah (1914-92), E.M.S. Namboodiripad (1909-1998), Jyoti Basu (1914-2010), and Bogendra Jha (1923-2009).
Despite their differences, Ankit’s eight subjects bore significant similarities. Their subjectivities as Hindu, high caste, upper-class men, who came of age at the height of the anti-colonial nationalist movement affected the ways they applied and refashioned communism for the local context. In many cases this included marked social conservatism and religious intolerance. This meant that difficult questions around nation, gender, caste and religion were rarely confronted.
By casting his analytical net beyond the usual suspects of M.N. Roy and Rajani Palme Dutt, Ankit offered an original take on early Communism in India. The cohort of Communists he discussed embodied a range of local contexts and intellectual trajectories, which naturally raised the question about the utility of the label ‘communist’. Not surprisingly, a good deal of the question-and-answer session was devoted to precisely this issue of nomenclature: if, as Ankit suggests, there is such a thing as a ‘Hindu Communist’, what do these two words really mean?
There are no easy answers to such questions, but at the very least these two papers illuminated different aspects of South Asian history and offered tantalising insights into the processes of modern globalisation. This, in turn, should challenge us to consider the relative importance of power, appropriation, and exchange in the modern world.
Rosalind Parr is PhD student in History. Her research interests are located in transnational and global histories of the twentieth century, particularly through the lenses of South Asian and gender history. Her thesis examines the international activities of Indian nationalist women in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. She is a members of the CSMCH steering committee.