Hindu Civilization and Indian Nationalism: Conceptual Conflicts and Convergences in the Works of Romesh Chunder Dutt, c. 1870–1910

Abstract

This paper is about a particular construction of nationalism at the hands of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), the well-known exponent of ‘economic nationalism’, in colonial Bengal from 1870 onwards till his death in 1909. In this construction of nationalism, which today scholars would best describe as ‘cultural nationalism’, the categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘national’ converged and became conflated. Through a discussion of Dutt’s ‘literary patriotism’, the paper seeks to answer why it was so in the case of someone like R C Dutt, and what implications we can draw from this regarding our understanding of colonial Indian nationalism and its origins. With reference to Dutt, Sudhir Chandra pointed out that the neat distinction that we draw between ‘economic nationalism’ and ‘cultural nationalism’ is fallacious. The paper reiterates and reinforces this argument by showing how cultural and political nationalisms were enmeshed together in the case of R C Dutt. Furthermore, the glorious past that Dutt reconstructed through his literary patriotism could not but be a Hindu past; he was not a vilifier of Muslims, but somehow he shelved the question of the place of Muslims in his construction of Indian nationhood.

1. Introduction

This paper is neither about Hinduism (the religion proper) nor about Hindu nationalism (religion put to political use), but about a particular construction of nationalism at the hands of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), the well-known exponent of ‘economic nationalism’, in colonial Bengal from 1870 onwards till his death in 1909. In this construction of nationalism, which today scholars would best describe as ‘cultural nationalism’, the categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘national’ converged and became conflated. First, why was it so, especially in the case of someone like R C Dutt, who is remembered especially as a champion of economic nationalism? Second, what are the implications of such a construction for our understanding of colonial Indian nationalism and its origins? These are the two principal questions this paper seeks to engage with. Two other questions invariably come up as offshoots and will be addressed in due course: how is this kind of nationalism different from the so-called ‘Hindu nationalism’, and in which category can we safely park this form of nationalism, which coexisted with a more secular variant of it in the same person?

Almost a decade ago, referring to R C Dutt, Sudhir Chandra remarked that the neat distinction we draw between ‘economic nationalism’ and ‘cultural nationalism’ is ill-founded (Chandra 2014). If we consider Dutt’s literary works and works on Indian civilization and history, we clearly see traces of what can be called ‘cultural nationalism’. While Chandra mainly discussed Dutt’s novel The Lake of Palms to make his point, the present paper discusses some of his other writings and reiterates and reinforces Chandra’s argument in challenging the facile divide drawn between the cultural identity of being a ‘Hindu’ and the national identity of being an Indian in colonial India. The origin of this divide can perhaps be traced back to the nationalist discourse of the 1920s, when ‘a polar contrast between national and communal politics’ (Sarkar 1996, p. 270) was constructed by the national movement itself under the leadership of the Congress. Gyanendra Pandey points out that while some degree of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ political mobilization was perceived as necessary earlier, the frequent outbreak of communal violence in north India from the decade of the 1910s onwards, coupled with other concomitant developments, made ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ politics ‘the chief flogging horse of Indian nationalism’ from the 1920s (Pandey 1992, p. 235). Pandey remarks,

Indian nationalism as we know it—a nationalism that stood above (or outside) the different religious communities and took as its unit the individual Indian citizen, a ‘pure’ nationalism unsullied, in theory, by the ‘primordial’ pulls of caste, religious community, etc.—was, I suggest, rigorously conceptualized only in opposition to this notion of communalism.

(Pandey 1992, p. 235, emphasis in original)

This distinction between a nationalism defined in religiocultural terms and a pure, unsullied Indian nationalism defined predominantly in secular terms has continued in the contemporary historiography of nationalism in India. However, if we look carefully, we would see that this divide is an artificial and post-facto construct especially informed by the communal tensions that flared up in Indian politics since the Swadeshi days, and that this divide did not exist in the minds of even secular-minded nationalists like Romesh Chunder Dutt. As it is being argued in this paper, Dutt was not a Hindu nationalist, but the concept of a Hindu civilization was undoubtedly an important component of his nationalism, where it coexisted with a more secular idea of nationhood. Colonial modernity in India was so complex that neat distinctions between tradition and modernity, reform and revival, secular and religious, and economic and cultural nationalisms all become elusive. In any case, such distinctions are anachronistic. Those whom we celebrate today as champions of modernity might have looked upon themselves as traditionalists. Those whom we consider today as champions of economic nationalism themselves did not perceive any conflict between economic and cultural nationalisms—the two not only could coexist in the same person, but, as shown in this paper, could also be related. As Amiya Sen notes, the period from the 1870s till the early years of the twentieth century is itself interesting ‘in its throwing up of an amazing variety of conflicting ideologies and opinion, some of which were juxtaposed in a rather intriguing relationship. Hence, both liberal-cosmopolitan values and what in certain respects seems to be their very opposite, arose almost concurrently and within broadly the same class of people’ (Sen 1993, p. 3). Using a single example of R C Dutt, the present paper similarly argues against presenting intellectual trends in colonial India as monochromatic.

It has generally been acknowledged that the emerging nationalist consciousness of the nineteenth century ‘adopted the heritage of Hindu culture as the focus of its identity and gloried in the Hindu past’ (Raychaudhuri 1988, p. 3). However, the vexed issue of religious culture defining national identity continued even well into the time when the Congress started discursively distinguishing between secular and communal politics. For example, Gandhi articulated his concept of ‘Ram Rajya’, by which he did not mean Hindu Raj but the Kingdom of God, where Ram and Rahim are one. For Gandhi, ‘Ram Rajya’ stood for just rule; but he chose a religious metaphor to communicate that ideal, which could have been articulated in purely secular terms as well. It may, thus, be argued that the tendency to associate religious culture with nationalism informed Indian nationalism since the very beginning and continued to do so later notwithstanding the growing menace of communalism. In fact, this may be one of the reasons for the enduring presence of Hindu nationalism in India that merely takes the issue of a national identity based on religion to an extreme level.

The next section of the paper briefly deals with theories and concepts pertaining to nationalism, cultural nationalism, and Hindu nationalism. Section 3 discusses briefly the intertwining of religion largely assimilated to the concept of culture and politics in the decade before Dutt started writing his novels. The next section introduces the literary patriotism of R C Dutt and delineates some of its prominent features. This is followed by a brief section that highlights the relationship between the past and the present in the works of R C Dutt. Section 6 dwells on the portrayal of Hindus and Muslims in Dutt’s works. The next section complicates the question of nationalism and asks if we can segregate a strictly secular form of nationalism from a nationalism inspired and informed by ideas on culture, especially religion.

2. Nationalism and the Place of Culture

Before delineating a definition of ‘Hindu nationalism’, it is essential to briefly discuss some issues pertaining to the concepts of nationalism and cultural nationalism. Scholars have unanimously agreed on the difficulty of arriving at a universally valid definition of ‘nationalism’, as historically, the phenomenon of nationalism has unfolded diversely. At best, ‘nationalism’ is an amorphous phenomenon that can at best be identified by certain observable features. Thus, John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith have attempted to define nationalism in terms of some common features:

Nationalism was, first of all, a doctrine of popular freedom and sovereignty. The people must be liberated—that is, free from any external constraint; they must determine their own destiny and be masters in their own house; they must control their own resources; they must obey only their own ‘inner’ voice. But that entailed fraternity. The people must be united; they must dissolve all internal divisions; they must be gathered together in a single historic territory, a homeland; and they must have legal equality and share a single public culture. But which culture and what territory? Only a homeland that was ‘theirs’ by historic right, the land of their forbears; only a culture that was ‘theirs’ as a heritage, passed down the generations, and therefore an expression of their authentic identity. Autonomy, unity, identity: these three themes and ideals have been pursued by nationalists everywhere…

(Hutchinson and Smith 1995, pp. 4–5)

If the concept of nationalism already includes culture—‘a culture that was “theirs” as a heritage, passed down the generations, and therefore an expression of their authentic identity’, then what is the need to conceptualize a separate category called ‘cultural nationalism’? John Hutchinson distinguishes between ‘political nationalism’ and ‘cultural nationalism’ as the former being ‘those projects aimed at the establishment of an independent nation state’, and the latter, ‘whose primary aim is the formation of national communities’ (Hutchinson 2013, p. 75, emphasis in original). Cultural nationalism, according to Hutchinson, originates ‘amongst historicist intellectuals’, precedes or accompanies political nationalism, and takes ‘the form of ethnohistorical “revivals” that promote a national language, literature and the arts, educational activities and economic self-help’, and their principal aim is ‘the formation of a moral community’ (Hutchinson 2013, p. 75). Hutchinson admits that, in practice, it is often hard to separate the two. Having accepted that, it is nonetheless useful to retain the theoretical distinction between the two. The way Hutchinson defines cultural nationalism, it is more suitable as a description for the politics of the Swadeshi period with its radical intermixing of religion/culture and politics. For R C Dutt, whose case was quite different from that of Swadeshi nationalists, we nonetheless have to use the expression ‘cultural nationalism’ for his imaginative and historical works, because they meet the basic definitional criterion of being ‘imbued with an “organic” romantic conception of the nation as a historical community’ (Hutchinson 2013, p. 76). In the case of Dutt, we have to settle for a broad and lenient definition of ‘cultural nationalism’—a tenet, wherein the nation is essentially constructed as a community through a historically produced cultural identity.

Religious nationalism is a form of cultural nationalism where there is primary focus on religious identity as constituting the core of cultural and national identity. A few cases in point are Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, the creation of Pakistan, the Iranian Revolution, Catholic nationalism in Poland, religious nationalism in Ireland, Greek Orthodox Church and religious nationalism in Greece, and so on. ‘Hindu nationalism’ is a form of religious nationalism observed in India. It is defined as the ‘belief that politics should be organized in accordance with the precepts of the Hindu scriptures and way of life. In its more extreme form, this takes the form of the promotion of a Hindu Rashtra (nation) in the Indian subcontinent’ (Brown et al. 2018). The rise of Hindu nationalism or political Hinduism in South Asia crystallized with the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925 (Jaffrelot 1996). Christophe Jaffrelot traces the beginning of Hindu nationalism particularly to the 1920s as he views its rise as concomitant with the rise of mass movement in the Congress under the leadership of Gandhi and the development of this ‘dominant idiom in Indian politics’ to which Hindu nationalism posited itself as ‘an alternative political culture’ (Jaffrelot 2007, p. 4). With the growing number of communal riots, the 1920s was also the ‘birthplace of the nationalist conception of “communalism”’ (Pandey 1992, p. 235), which is closely tied with Hindu nationalism. It is, however, well accepted, even by Jaffrelot, that the antecedents of Hindu nationalism go back to the late nineteenth century, especially starting with the decade of the 1870s. The antecedents can be traced to a number of developments, such as the establishment of the Arya Samaj in 1875 (Zavos 2000), the complex politics of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), the founding of Hindu Sabhas in Punjab, and other drivers and factors.

It will be seen from the following passages that Romesh Dutt’s was in no way religious nationalism or Hindu nationalism. However, his was a cultural nationalism where religion, that is, Hinduism, played a central role. In his cultural nationalism, ‘Hindu’ referred more to a culture than a mere religion, though religious elements were also importantly present in that conception of culture. In Dutt’s literary works, national identity comes across as a composite identity, where it is difficult to extricate the Hindu from the Indian. Thus, it will be observed that, often for him, Hindu and Indian were coterminous, however, not in a way that others were excluded. Dutt was located at a juncture in history where he was concerned with the past (reconstructing and narrating a glorious Hindu/Indian past) and the present (famine and poverty), but the future was not yet in sight; that is, he did not yet engage with the question of how the future India would be. Therefore, the place of the Muslim, who was often an antagonist of the Hindu in the past, in the future Indian polity was a question he did not have to publicly engage with.

3. The Hindu and the National

This section will discuss some trends that the young Romesh Chunder was witness to in order to understand what kind of discourses might have informed the conceptual convergences between the Hindu and the national in Dutt’s works. The subject of discussion here is the ‘Hindu Mela’, which was started in 1867 by Nabagopal Mitra (1840–1894), inspired and backed by Brahmo leaders, such as Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899) and Debendranath Tagore’s son and later also nephew, Dwijendranath Tagore (1840–1926) and Ganendranath Tagore (1841–1869), respectively. It will be shown how in the Hindu Mela, the ‘Hindu’ and the ‘national’ converged and coalesced into the idea of a ‘national culture’. Although no direct connection is known to the present author between the ‘Hindu Mela’ (started in 1867) and R. C. Dutt, this organization, nonetheless, formed an important part of the immediate context in which Dutt was writing. It would help us understand the episteme in which Dutt operated, and which shaped not only the contours of his thinking, but also that of his readers.

Swarupa Gupta calls the ‘Hindu Mela’ (literally Hindu Fair) ‘the first organised expression of cultural nationhood’ (Gupta 2009). I would like to call it the first expression of nationhood itself in colonial India, even though its articulation was cultural. With the ‘Hindu Mela’, the idea of a national culture as constituting a national identity, even though not framed politically, was formulated along with an emphasis on self-help. The usual nationalist historiography traces the origin of an organized expression of Indian nationalism to the establishment of the Indian National Congress. However, strictly speaking, the first effort at an organized expression of nationalist sentiment was the ‘Hindu Mela’, also known as the ‘Jatiya1 Sabha’ (National Gathering). It was organized well before the establishment of the Congress in 1885) and even before the establishment of the Indian Association by Surendranath Banerjee in 1876. The only possible forerunner was the British Indian Association established in 1851, which many would not agree to call nationalist as it contained the tag ‘British’, even though their agenda was the promotion of education in India and so on.

In the case of the Hindu Mela/Jatiya Sabha, the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Jatiya’ (national) were used in a coterminous manner, and although there were pronounced religiocultural elements in it, it would be anachronistic to consider this endeavor as an expression of Hindu nationalism. As noted above, some of the organizers were eminent Brahmos of the Debendranath Tagore branch of Brahmoism. The Brahmo movement was not an instance of political nationalism; however, their plea for reform of Hinduism and distilling the true essence of Hinduism largely in response to Western critique somehow kick-started the quest for the true Swadeshi in terms of ideas and ideals. Further, as pointed out by Julian Strube, while ‘Brahmoism was dominated by a universalist thrust in the first half of the nineteenth century, the second half saw growing nationalist tendencies and several schisms…’ (Strube 2021, p. 293).

In Rajnarayan Basu, the maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), one can see the culmination of this line of thinking into the kind of revival promoting national language, national culture, and so on, that is associated with ‘cultural nationalism’. According to Jogesh Chandra Bagal, the Tattvabodhini Sabha under the leadership of Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), Akshay Kumar Dutt (1820–1886), and Rajnarayan Basu and its mouthpiece the Tattvabodhini Patrika played an important role in anticipating the quest for national identity, autonomy, and self-help (Bagal 1945, p. 1). Rajnarayan Basu, the quintessential product of Western education, was in one of the best positions to understand the flaws of such an education and culture. He established a Surapan-nibarani Sabha (Society for the Prohibition of Alcohol Consumption) in 1861, and soon thereafter also established a Jatiya Gourab Sampadani or Gourabechha Sancharini Sabha (Society for the Promotion of National Glory). The purpose behind these associations was to promote national culture. Basu’s Prospectus of a Society for the Promotion of National Feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal, published in 1866, ‘called for a “reform in national shape,” reprimanding Bengalis for renouncing the Hindu name because of a “desire for change and progress,” which threatened to “sweep away whatever good we have inherited from our ancestors. […] Without due cultivation of national feeling, no nation can be eventually great”’ (Strube 2021, p. 298). The backdrop of this pamphlet was the later-day Brahmo leader Keshub Chandra Sen’s (1838–1884) breakaway from the Brahmo Samaj run by Debendranath Tagore, who refused to dissociate the movement from the Hindu samaj (for them, Brahmoism represented, at the end of the day, the best and the purest in Hinduism), while the young Keshub was impatient with tolerance of social ills associated with Hindu society. Nabagopal Mitra, the founder editor of National Paper, patronized by Debendranath, published this pamphlet in his weekly and, inspired by it, founded the Hindu Mela in 1867. The aim of the Hindu Mela/Jatiya Sabha was to bring together under one umbrella (a political and cultural fest) Indians (read ‘Hindus’) to cultivate pride in and promote national culture (defined in terms of Hindu culture) and national language (the regional language Bengali), and promote self-help and physical culture in the form of indigenous wrestling and so on.

In 1872, Basu gave a lecture titled ‘Hindudharmer shresthata’ (The Superiority of Hinduism). But what did he mean by Hinduism? ‘If one reflects carefully, one would perceive that the worship of parabrahman [the Absolute] is Hinduism…Brahman is the centre-point of Hinduism’ (Basu 1872, p. 1, my translation). The National Paper, which carried a report of the lecture, presented a very useful and succinct summary of it (Basu 1872, pp. i–iii), where it was remarked that the ‘lecturer showed that Brahmo Dharma is the highest developed form of Hindooism’ (Basu 1872, p. iii). Despite contradictions and tensions, the universalist agenda of the Brahmos and the nationalist agenda of the emerging nationalists—even though it was constructed in Hindu terms—were organically related. The decided preference of the Debendranath Tagore camp to remain within the fold of Hinduism is instructive. Basu was claiming the superiority of Hinduism precisely based on the idea that the best and pristine essence of Hinduism is what is represented by Brahmoism.

Within a decade of his passing away, Rajnarayan Basu was hailed as the ‘Grandfather of Indian Nationalism’ (Sarkar 1909). Was the tension between universalism and nationalism so quickly resolved? Probably not; however, the tying up of the discourse around Hinduism with the emergent nationalism became an enduring phenomenon. The politics of the Swadeshi age, which was deeply tinged with a religious color, has been viewed by Sumit Sarkar as the entry point of religion into politics (Sarkar 1973). Sarkar argues that a ‘process of inversion’ took place in the course of the Swadeshi movement, when religion, ‘cultivated at first as a means to the end of mass contact and stimulation of morale could all too easily become an end in itself’ (Sarkar 1973, p. 315). However, if we take into account the developments discussed above, it is an unlikely proposition that initially religion was merely a means to a political end. Statements such as ‘it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism’ (Aurobindo Ghose’s Uttarpara Speech, Sri Aurobindo 1997, p. 12) would find a logical predecessor in the definition of Indian nationhood in terms of Hindu religion, culture, and values as articulated in the 1870s. Again, statements such as ‘the strength which spoke in the Vedas and Upanishads… is born once more amongst us, and its name today is Nationality’ (Nivedita 2010, p. 205) are much nuanced and layered in meaning that only an archaeology of ideas can reveal.

Lastly, in 1866, Rajnarayan Basu also clearly spelled out the link between national sentiment and a national language, which is part of national culture. Bankim Chandra reiterated it in the first issue of Banga Darshan. Language is an important vehicle for the expression and consolidation of nationalism. Besides Hinduism, the promotion of the Bengali language was thus an important element of the ‘nationalism’ articulated in Bengal during the 1870s. R. C. Dutt’s immediate and extended family were, on the other hand, well known for their prolific literary and other works in English and even French. The poet Toru Dutt (1856–1877), who wrote in English and French, was Romesh’s cousin. Toru Dutt’s family became Christians in 1862. The following section will discuss how, notwithstanding such a family background, Dutt was first inspired to write in Bengali by none other than Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894), and how Dutt’s writing career eventually unfolded in a way that he set out in a quest for the true Indian identity through history with the help of original Sanskrit sources.

4. The Literary Patriotism of Romesh Chunder Dutt

R. C. Dutt’s uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–1885), was one of the early Indian English writers who wrote a number of books, especially on historical subjects, under the pennames J. A. G. Barton and Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney. It was S. C. Dutt who wrote the first historical stories Tales of Yore around 1848. However, he was of the opinion that it was not unpatriotic to prefer English to Bengali as the medium of literary works, as the Bengali language was unrefined and unfit for sophisticated communication. This was a period that, in a convocation address to Calcutta University, Rabindranath Tagore referred to as ‘a time when the pupils in the first standard of a Normal School thought it no shame to say that they did not know Bengali; and the people of this country rewarded them with promotion’ (Clark 1961, p. 430). Romesh Chunder later recounted to his younger contemporary and friend, Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), ‘with mingled shame and amusement’ the world in which his childhood passed—‘a world in which a poet thought it proper to write in French and English’ (Nivedita 1999, p. 261).

This was in the early 1850s. Bankim Chandra or Michael Madhusudan Dutt had not yet arrived on the scene. With Bankim’s Banga Darshan (1872), it became a widely accepted fact among Bengal’s intelligentsia that Bengali could be the vehicle of expression of the most noble thoughts. When Romesh Chunder met Bankim Chandra, a close friend of his father’s, after his return from England, the latter convinced him to write in Bengali. By 1874, Dutt’s first Bengali novel was appearing in serial form in a Bengali magazine, and in the next five years, Dutt had three more novels to his credit and was considered second only to Bankim (Rule 1977, p. 79). These four novels were Banga Bijeta (Conqueror of Bengal) (1874), Madhabi Kankan (Bracelet of Flowers) (1877), Maharashtra Jibanprabhat (The Dawn of Life for the Marathas) (1878), and Rajput Jivansandhya (The Sundown of Life for the Rajputs) (1879). All four deal with Muslim rule and Muslim characters, but the last two are, strictly speaking, closer to historical facts than the first two, which are largely works of fiction. We shall come back to the question of Muslims in due course.

Other works on Indian history and culture soon followed. From 1874 to 1876, Dutt wrote a series of articles in Bengal Magazine, and in 1877, he brought them out together in the form of a book, The Literature of Bengal, of which he published a drastically revised version, titled Cultural Heritage of Bengal, in 1896. This book is important in the sense that it presents Dutt’s view of a history of progress of the Bengali people and culture through the development of literature in the Bengali language. Since language is tied with nationalism, this effort too had the objective of bolstering patriotic sentiments among the Bengalis. In 1877 and 1878, Dutt published two articles in the Bengal Magazine—‘Civilisation in Ancient India’ and ‘Hindu Philosophy’. In 1879 was published Dutt’s Bharatvarsher Itihas, a history of India in Bengali aimed at the school textbook market. Dutt revived his Sanskrit studies in the 1880s and, shortly thereafter, set himself to the task of translating the Rig Veda into Bengali. This was followed by the three-volume A History of Civilization in Ancient India, Based on Sanscrit Literature. His abridged translation of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into metrical English verse came out in 1898 and 1899. Apart from these and his more famous books on economic ravages of colonialism, he also wrote books such as The Civilization of India and multivolume History of India, A brief history of ancient and modern India according to the syllabus.

What was the purpose behind an anglicized civil servant painstakingly documenting Indian history, culture, and the early religion of the Hindus? First, there was his own literary ambition of attaining fame as a writer. However, that was not all. In one of his novels, he wrote, ‘Gentle reader, my sole object has been to narrate the glories of our past and the greatness of our national heroes. If I have succeeded in kindling a single spark of love and admiration for our national heroes, then not in vain did I take up my pen’ (Gupta 1911, p. 69). His son-in-law, J. N Gupta, noted that the pursuit of literature was to Dutt ‘only a means to an end—only one, though perhaps the most powerful, medium for revivifying the national mind of India, and restoring to her sons their lost faith in her past’ (Gupta 1911, p. 52). For Dutt, Madhusudan Dutt, and Bankim Chandra, all rendered a ‘service to the Motherland’ through their literary works. His ambition was to belong ‘to that band of noble-hearted patriots and gifted men who have taught us to regard our past religion and history and literature with legitimate and manly admiration. For our first and greatest indebtedness for the progress of this half-century is to those who have brought us to have faith in ourselves’ (cited in Gupta 1911, p. 52).

Pauline Rule (1977) points out that Dutt was conscious of the need to revive Indians’ pride in their past, for he understood that this pride was key to the development of patriotic sentiments. An authorial digression in the Maharashtra Jibanprabhat reads, ‘Reader, I have taken up the pen only in the hope that we can sit together to sing of our nation’s glory and remember the bravery of the past’ (cited in Mukherjee 2009, p. 225). In the introduction to A History of Civilization in Ancient India, Dutt wrote, ‘No study has […] so potent an influence in forming a nation’s character as a critical and careful study of its past history. And it is by such study alone that an unreasoning and superstitious knowledge of the past is replaced by a legitimate and manly admiration’ (cited in Mukherjee 2009, p. 225).

It should be noted that for all his glorification of the ancient past, his books were not always greeted with appreciation. In the chapter on Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar in Cultural Heritage of Bengal, Dutt mentioned in a footnote, ‘When I commenced a translation of the Rigveda Sanhita into the vernacular of Bengal in 1885, my endeavour to popularize the ancient scriptures met with a perfect storm of opposition from my orthodox countrymen. Among the few Pandits who encouraged me in the task was the venerable Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar’ (Dutt 1896a, p. 117). Meenakshi Mukherjee (2009) points out that one of the major criticisms against him was that he was not a Brahmin and, hence, did not have the right to read the Vedas. Vidyasagar was his ally in this project. Dutt made use of Vidyasagar’s rich library of Sanskrit manuscripts, and the latter also helped clarify many of his doubts regarding the text during their occasional early-morning walks together. Dutt himself recalled, ‘Those who used Hindu religion as a means of earning their livelihood were aghast at the thought that every Bengali would have direct access to the Rig Veda. They showered abuse on the translator and raised a hue and cry about the scriptures being defiled’ (cited in Mukherjee 2009, pp. 216–17). After Vidyasagar’s death, in due course, Dutt was able to enlist the support of other Sanskrit scholars, all of whom were Brahmins, to launch a collective translation project titled Hindu Shastra, of which nine volumes came out between 1893 and 1897. Satyabrata Samashrayi, Krishnakamal Bhattacharya, Kalidas Vedantabagish, Hemchandra Vidyaratna, Damodar Vidyaratna, Ashutosh Shastri, and Hrishikesh Shastri were his collaborators in this project (Mukherjee 2009, p. 343). Thus, while Dutt was glorifying ancient Hindu civilization, he was simultaneously receiving flak from a section of orthodox Hindus. Dutt was interested in highlighting the manly and martial nature of ancient Hindus; his portrayal of boisterous Hindus left a section of Hindu society cold as they thought Dutt did not portray the Hindus as spiritual enough.

Again, in 1890, Bangabasi complained that in History of India, Dutt treated Rama and Krishna as creations of imagination (though this is not completely true). However, a rejoinder to Bangabasi came from a regional weekly, Burdwan Sanjibani, which posed the question ‘Can Mr. Dutt’s book possibly do more harm than is done by books written by European scholars?’ It wrote further that in missionary schools, ‘Hindu children read the Bible and are daily told that their religion is full of superstition. But the religious sensibility of the Hindu are not hurt on that account, and it is certainly strange news that the society which tolerates this has been thrown into convulsions by the publication of Mr Dutt’s book’ (cited in Chowdhury Sengupta 1993, p. 101). Amiya Sen mentions that ‘the opposition to the idea of Dutt’s book being accepted by the Central Text Book Committee came from orthodox organizations situated as far as Dacca and Barisal. Incidentally, the Bengal Exchange Gazette found it intriguing that a certain Mr. Wheeler’s work which spoke of the Hindu eternally being born as a slave (and also dying as one) was accepted as a text book in preference to Dutt’s History in Bengali’ (Sen 1993, p. 21).

Romesh Chunder was poignantly aware of the shortcomings of an Indian history written in English by English authors. Thus, in 1877, Dutt wrote, ‘History continues to be studied in English and little progress has been made in this subject in the Bengali language, except in the matter of school books’ (cited in Chowdhury Sengupta 1993, p. 104). Dutt became increasingly interested in Sanskrit sources for reconstructing the Indian past and in giving shape to this past from an Indian perspective. Dutt’s understanding of the Indian past came to him gradually. Rule (1977) argues that there is a qualitative difference between his writings on history in the 1870s and those that were written later, especially after his renewed study of the Sanskrit language in the 1880s. Many of his own questions about the Indian past were unanswered, and there were gaps in his understanding in the 1870s.

Dutt tried to fill these gaps with travels with his brother Jogesh Chunder Dutt in northern and eastern India to explore historical remains. Romesh and Jogesh Chunder turned to the Rajtarangini as an important Sanskrit source for reconstructing the Indian past. The latter even started translating the text into English. Both brothers were of the opinion that it was possible to reconstruct the Indian past based completely on Sanskrit sources. Likely for this reason, R C Dutt revived his study of the Sanskrit language in 1885, and, soon after, undertook to translate the Rig Veda into Bengali. That he chose to translate it into Bengali instead of English is instructive2. On his birthday in 1877, he wrote to Jogesh Chunder, ‘My own mother tongue must be my line, and before I die I hope to leave what will enrich the language and will continue to please my countrymen after I am dead’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 97). Dutt’s articles ‘Hindu Philosophy’ and ‘Civilization in Ancient India’, published in the Bengal Magazine in 1877 and 1878 under the pen name ‘Una’, were still heavily dependent on secondary sources. In these articles, he tried to show ‘the several stages of development through which the Hindu intellect has passed’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 130), but probably failed to produce the kind of history of ideas that he aimed at producing.

After the revival of his Sanskrit studies, access to Sanskrit sources in original put him in a position to coherently reconstruct Indian history on a grand scale. It was a past that he was not merely recreating for his readers, but also discovering for himself. Nivedita, who was witness to the intellectual growth of Dutt, remarked that he ‘had none to lead him in the path of nationality. Gradually, he said, as he worked on from point to point, he began to see the greatness of his own country and his own people…’ (Nivedita 1999, p. 261). She also makes this insightful statement that the ‘writing of “Civilization in Ancient India” was one of the turning-points in his career… having begun, he found himself being re-created by his own work. The task of writing was a task of self-education’ (Nivedita 1999, p. 262). It is evident from the above discussion that the past played a significant role in the narrative he constructed through his writings. The present was equally important in this narrative. The next section will look more closely at the interplay of past and present in his works.

5. Past and Present

While antiquarians, such as Rajendralal Mitra, were equally critical of the Indian past and present, R C Dutt was very clear that his purpose was not to arrive at an impartial history of India for the scholar, but to cull out a narrative of the glorious past for the lay reader with the aim of stoking patriotism. According to him, ‘the past should be ransacked not for mere curiosity but for the present’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 126). This was by no means intellectual dishonesty or any kind of blind spot; this was the very purpose for which he was writing historical fiction or narratives—to endear India to Indians; he did not have any pretensions of being an unbiased historian. Leonard Gordon writes,

Through his writing, Romesh Dutt set himself a number of tasks and addressed himself to several audiences. In his prefaces, he specifies these audiences and explains how he will edify them. He saw himself performing a number of link roles, providing an entrée to certain traditions which otherwise would be unavailable to these readers. First he saw himself as a spokesman for enlightened public opinion in India… Another role he sought was that of interpreter and transmitter of the “true history of India”… He did no original work on ancient India; he felt it his job to present Indian history, traditions, and literature in a clear and balanced way, rather than offering erudite scholarship.

(Gordon 1979, pp. 45–46)

Dutt declared unabashedly, ‘The past must teach the present, and the present should elucidate the past’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 127). The glorious past is what would shape the present national identity of the people.

The idea of a progress from the past to the present to the future was an underlying philosophy of his works, and this was undoubtedly shaped by an evolutionary view of history and by Comtian positivism, which were prominent intellectual movements in Europe during the nineteenth century. An important intellectual influence on Dutt was the British historian H T Buckle. Dutt’s repeated attempts at writing a history of the civilization of India was inspired by Buckle’s unfinished project of History of Civilization of England. ‘Civilization’ in that age meant something every specific, and Dutt adopted both the method and several theories enunciated by Buckle to formulate and explain universal rules of behavior and historical evolution. On the home front, Bankim’s influence on Dutt was indelible, be it in his inspiration to compose literary works in Bengali or to write historical fiction or to present something patriotic to the readers. However, points out Rule, from 1885 onwards, increasingly, Max Mueller replaced Bankim Chandra as the fountainhead of an intellectual framework for Dutt’s works. Mueller’s ideas related to the Aryan race as well as the evolution of religion became an important influence on Dutt. The ‘Indian’ civilization that Dutt portrayed in his book is predominantly Aryan/Hindu civilization of the Vedic age and its legacy in the life of Indians even in present times.

While explaining why he chose to translate the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, he wrote, ‘To know the two Indian epics is to understand the Indian people better. And to trace the influence of the Indian epics on the life and manners of the Hindu nation, and on the development of their modern languages, and religious reforms, is to comprehend the real history of the people during three thousand years’ (Dutt 1899, p. 192). He further wrote that ‘in India, the Ramayana is still a living tradition and a living faith. It forms the basis of the moral instruction of a nation, and it is a part of the lives of two hundred millions of people’ (Dutt 1899, p. 190). As pointed out by Sheshalatha Reddy, ‘the epics are excavated treasures that, for Dutt, embody not the dead weight of a now inanimate object but a living, breathing, speaking voice’ (Reddy 2012, p. 247, emphasis in original). Thus, the emphasis is on the aspect of a past that lives on in the present, as past mores and ideals continue to inform and shape the present. In his discussion of Dutt’s social novel Sansar (1886), which Dutt himself translated into English as The Lake of Palms, Sudhir Chandra points out how ‘the past is inserted as a basic and recurrent theme in this realistic novel’, though ‘in terms of the structure of the narrative, the insertion remains unconvincing and mars the flow of the narrative’. However, ‘so important is the idealization of the past in Dutt’s scheme of things that, despite its parenthetical character, it occupies nearly as much space as do the more integral constituents of the narrative: the past figures compulsively as a personal and collective psychological necessity’ (Chandra 2014, p. 66). Chandra writes,

In The Lake of Palms Dutt is not looking for a pristine past far removed from a superstitious present. He searches for a past that lives on in the present. This is not mere revivalism, because it is not enough that Sarat, symbolizing the culturally deracinated youth, should discover his heritage and, through it, his national identity. Dutt considers it important that he be able to relate this identity with the life and values of the older generation, from whom he has been estranged. It is in account of this kind of revivalism that… Sarat comprehends the reality of Banaras in the company of a devout old woman.

(Chandra 2014, p. 68)

6. Hindu and Muslim

In all of the discussions above, though the word ‘Indian’ was used, Dutt’s own writings significantly address a Hindu audience. This audience is Hindu by default. To whom else would he recount the glories of the Rig Veda, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata? The portrayal of Muslims in Dutt’s novels is interesting in this respect. Rule notes that in the ‘early novels of Bankim and those of Romesh Chunder, the heroes and heroines are mostly Hindus, frequently, but not always, in conflict with their Muslim rulers. Dutt displayed no hostility towards the Muslims and could even occasionally cast them in a heroic mold, as he does, for example, with the brave Muslim soldier Chandrakhan in Maharashtra Jivanprabhat’ (Rule 1977, p. 82). All of Dutt’s four historical novels had Hindu–Muslim antagonism as a backdrop. Banga Bijeta is about how only the Hindu Todar Mal could keep Bengal under the Mughal rule, while Akbar’s Muslim generals failed. Madhabi Kankan has Shah Jahan’s rule as the backdrop. Maharashtra Jibanprabhat is about the contest between Shivaji and Aurangzeb, and Rajput Jivansandhya is about Rana Pratap’s struggle with Akbar. According to Chandra, in the intervening years between his first and last historical novels, Dutt ‘realized there were risks in recreating a past which overlooked the achievements of Indian Muslims. A period of introspection and a different kind of creative gestation then followed. When Dutt’s first social novel, Sansar, came out seven years later, in 1886, there was a marked shift in his treatment of the past. Though he idealized a Hindu–Buddhist past in Sansar, Dutt avoided the anti-Muslim bias that had run through his historical novels’ (Chandra 2014, p. 66). How Chandra came to the conclusion that the plot of Hindu–Muslim confrontation was consciously avoided by Dutt is not clear, but it is true that there is a difference in the tenor and the texture of his earlier and later novels. Dutt undoubtedly matured over the years as a writer and a thinker. However, even in his earlier discursive writings of the 1870s, such as The Peasantry of Bengal, he showed no prejudice against the Muslims, who formed the majority of the population of suffering ryots in eastern and southern Bengal where Dutt was posted. It may be safely assumed that Dutt was not prejudiced against Muslims and was in fact capable of appreciating and portraying the good qualities in Muslim characters as well. However, the dominant trend among the Bengali Hindu intellectuals of his times was to glorify an Indian past that was conceived exclusively as a Hindu past, and Dutt partook of this conceptualization, probably choosing to shelve the Muslim question, that is, the place of the Muslims in this concept of nationhood.

In Maharashtra Jibanprabhat, Dutt narrated a conversation between Shivaji disguised as Mahadeo and Yashwant Singh, whom the former was trying to woo to his side:

Is it proper that Aurangzeb should impose the Jizia tax on Hindus because they belong to another religion? Is it proper of him to insult Hindu gods and goddesses and desecrate Hindu temples? Is it proper that he should demolish the shrine in Kashi and build a mosque with those stones in the same sacred spot?

(Mukherjee 2009, p. 345)

He portrayed another character, Jai Singh, who gave an opposite logic for not abandoning the side of Aurangzeb:

If Hindu dharma cannot be protected through truth, how can it be protected through treachery? If a warrior’s blood cannot nurture the seed of freedom, can a warrior’s betrayal do it? Deceit is anathema to a soldier…Go teach your Maratha soldiers to win a straight battle. Tell them to forget deviousness and cunning tricks.

(Mukherjee 2009, p. 230)

However, in both cases, it is a win–win situation for the Hindu. Either they would invoke the pride and shame associated with their religion and its humiliation—which would be tantamount to ‘patriotism’, or they would be exemplary in taking the side of truth and duty—which is also a matter of glory for the Hindu.

In his early novels, Dutt was also particularly interested in portraying the martial qualities of the Hindus. For instance, in one of his novels, he remarked that ‘the Hindus had always been renowned as a nation of warriors. It is only since the conquest of the whole of India by the Mahomedans that they have lost that time-honoured celebrity’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 127). R. C. Dutt was also deeply interested in the progress of ancient Hindus in the field of science and knowledge in general. Hence, he took special interest in highlighting that ancient Hindus were highly advanced in commerce and trade, industry, and agriculture, producing fine cloths, iron, paper, glass, precious metals, and gems. The Vedic people were ‘agriculturalists, weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters, goldsmiths and forgers, as well as perfumers, painters, confectioners, actors, jewellers, ivory-workers, and stone-cutters’ (cited in Rule 1977, p. 127). Rule points out that ‘the chronicle of achievements continued with an argument that the Hindus were the originators of the sciences of astronomy, geometry, algebra and grammar’ (Rule 1977, p. 128).

Leonard Gordon is of the opinion that Dutt’s school history textbooks were specifically for Hindu readers. In support of his argument, Gordon cites a passage from the preface to the first edition of Dutt’s A Brief History of Ancient and Modern Bengal for the Use of Schools, where Dutt argued that for ‘a Hindu boy, the History of Bengal should not commence with the conquest of the country by Bakhtiyar Khilji’ (cited in Gordon 1979, p. 46). Instead, Dutt proposed that this history should start with ‘the cultured Videhas who cultivated Vedic learning and composed the Upanishads in North Behar and developed those systems of Mental Philosophy and Logic which are still admired in Europe’ (cited in Gordon 1979, p. 46). From there on, he covered Magadha, Asoka, Nalanda, the Kesari and Ganga kings of Odisha, and Palas and Senas of Bengal, and concluded that he ‘considered it necessary to narrate these facts of the Hindu period in five chapters in order that some recollections of them may live in the minds of educated Hindus long after they have ceased to be students’ (cited in Gordon 1979, p. 47). Gordon is quick to point out that, in this particular book, Dutt never addressed a Muslim or a British reader, though he devotes five chapters each to Muslim and British periods. Gordon also argues that, in general, Dutt wrote for Hindu and British readers, focused on Hindu and British periods in Indian history, and wrote ‘more skimpily on the age of Muslim predominance’ (Gordon 1979, p. 47). There is a truth in this statement.

For example, that Dutt translated the two epics for Hindu as well as European readers is clear from the translator’s epilogues in the two books. The introduction to the Mahabharata translation and a later combined edition (1900) was written by Max Mueller, photogravures by the English illustrator Evelyn Stuart Hardy were included, and the texts were first published as part of Temple Classics series and later by Everyman’s Library series. Specially bound volumes of the two epics were gifted to Queen Victoria. In 1899, Dutt was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and on 14 June, he read a paper on the Mahabharata before a large but select audience at the Society in Hanover Square. Thus, he was not constructing an Indian past only before the Indians, but also before the British. His was the first English translation of the complete epic, though in abridged form, in metrical verse.3 On the other hand, that the translations were equally aimed at Hindu readers is amply clear from several passages in the epilogues, some of which are reproduced below:

…the people of modern India know how to appreciate their ancient heritage. It is not an exaggeration to state that the two hundred millions of Hindus of the present day cherish in their hearts the story of their ancient Epics. The Hindu scarcely lives, man or woman, high or low, educated or ignorant, whose earliest recollections do not cling round the story and the characters of the great Epics.

(Dutt 1898, p. 185)

Mothers in India know no better theme for imparting wisdom and instruction to their daughters, and elderly men know no richer storehouse for narrating tales to children, than these stories preserved in the Epics. No work in Europe, not Homer in Greece or Virgil in Italy, not Shakespeare or Milton in English speaking lands, is the national property of the nations to the same extent as the Epics of India are of the Hindus.

(Dutt 1898, p. 185)

Particularly interesting is his explanation for the existence of two epics in India4:

The modern reader will now comprehend why India produced, and has preserved for well-nigh three thousand years, two Epics instead of one national Epic. No work of the imagination abides long unless it is animated by some sparks of imperishable truth, unless it truly embodies some portion of our human feelings, human faith and human life. The Mahabharata depicts the political life of ancient India, with all its valour and heroism, ambition and lofty chivalry. The Ramayana embodies the domestic and religious life of ancient India, with all its tenderness and sweetness, its endurance and devotion. The one picture without the other were incomplete; and we should know but little of the ancient Hindus if we did not comprehend their inner life and faith as well as their political life and their warlike virtues. The two together give us a true and graphic picture of ancient Indian life and civilisation; and no nation on earth has preserved a more faithful picture of its glorious past.

(Dutt 1899, pp. 188–89)

In both the epilogues, Dutt repeatedly used the word ‘Hindu’ and presented the two epics as the embodiments of the cherished ideals of the Hindus. The abridged translation5 of the two epics was meant to make accessible the knowledge of India that lies therein. Through this project, he was able to construct what ancient India stood for and what defined the quintessence of Hindu/Indian civilization. According to Sheshalatha Reddy, ‘in transposing the Sanskrit sloka into the English trochaic octametre in his translations, Dutt measures out “India” in verse, transposing the material, metrical, and spoken (or chanted) form of the once-known to the once-again nation. His translations of the ancient epics simultaneously establish and blur the epochal time of a historically and geographically stable and singular entity known as “India” and in so doing illustrate the fraught category of “Modern Indian Literature” and the modern Indian nation, which depends on recovering an “authentic” pre-colonial identity to inaugurate Indian modernity under British colonial rule’ (Reddy 2012, p. 247).

Dutt’s position vis-à-vis religion was quite specific. He wrote,

Religion is a sentiment more than a doctrine or creed, and I often feel regret that this sentiment, ingrained in the Indian heart, is not fostered by the modern system of education.

(Cited in Chandra 2014, p. 189)

I never had any regular and systematic religious instruction at home. My mother, who was a pious Hindu, and deeply religious by nature and instinct, told us, when I scarcely knew my alphabet, those sacred legends in which religious lessons are conveyed in the East… I felt impelled to make this ancient storehouse accessible to my countrymen generally.

(Cited in Chandra 2014, p. 189)

It may be argued that, in his case, religion was assimilated into the broader category of culture. Meenakshi Mukherjee writes,

Romesh Chunder Dutt the novelist was a Hindu nationalist but in his personal life he distanced himself from the rituals of orthodox Hinduism. He valued the Vedas and the epics largely from cultural, historical and literary perspectives. A close reading of his novels might also reveal that more than religion, what ignited Dutt’s imagination was India’s geographical vastness and historical depth… Dutt’s four historical novels are riven with many…contradictory impulses… the delineation of religion is not done in a seamless manner. The dominant Hindu rhetoric of the novels is occasionally deflected when individual Muslim characters are invested with nobility. Whenever two brave men—one Hindu and one Muslim—come face to face, both admirable in their integrity and honour, the religious agenda is temporarily shelved. The Muslims are not consistently seen as the homogenized ‘other’.

(Mukherjee 2009, pp. 232–33)

Dutt called himself a ‘progressive conservative’, which probably meant a Hindu who knew his scriptures, but who, in his personal life, was not willing to follow empty rituals or meaningless social restrictions. For all his admiration and emulation of Bankim Chandra, whom Brajendranath Seal called the ‘head of gold’ of ‘the Hindu revival’ (Seal 1903), Dutt never went so far as to lose balance and fairness. While describing the successive stages of the ‘Hindu awakening’ in Bengal, Amiya Sen argues that till ‘the 1880s or so, this “awakening” was largely propelled by a new energy born within the Western educated Hindu of rediscovering the rational and humanist elements within his own tradition and thereby restoring an ancient civilization to health and credibility. Hereafter, this reformist outlook gradually came to be tarnished, if not wholly replaced, by more short-sighted and insular views on religion and society’ (Sen 1993, p. 4). Dutt was clearly situated on this side of the fence of ‘Hindu awakening’, where one could glorify Hindu culture within the bounds of reasonableness.

7. Nationalisms

Mukherjee probably uses the expression ‘Hindu nationalist’ in a loose sense. Dutt’s nationalism cannot be called Hindu nationalism in the sense in which we use it today, as he did not claim that modern Indian polity should be based on Hindu norms, nor did he argue for the establishment of a Hindu rashtra at the exclusion of Muslims. However, the glorification of Hindu religion, culture, and the ‘Hindu Aryan people’ was undoubtedly an important component of Dutt’s nationalism. Gordon rightly points out that the ‘national’ in Dutt’s novels means Hindu (Gordon 1979, p. 46); however, what larger understanding we derive out of this knowledge is the most crucial point. ‘National’ for Dutt could not but be Hindu, although it is not Hindu in an exclusive sense. Gyanendra Pandey points out that, in the nineteenth century, there was some amount of ambiguity regarding the boundaries of the term ‘Hindu’, which was often used to mean everybody who lived in India, including Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, and others (Pandey 1993). For instance, in his famous Ballia lecture in the 1880s, Bharatendu Harishchandra said, ‘Whoever lives in Hindustan… is a Hindu’ and by that he meant ‘Bengalis, Marathis, Panjabis, Madrasis, Vaidiks, Jains, Brahmos, Musalmans’ (cited in Pandey 1993, p. 245). Around the same time, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan used the term ‘Hindu’ exactly in the same sense to mean ‘the inhabitants of Hindustan’ (cited in Pandey 1993, p. 245). Not that Dutt used the term ‘Hindu’ in this sense, but this at least proves that identities were still quite fluid towards the end of the nineteenth century.

It is useful here to remember the history of the origin and evolution of the word ‘Hindu’. The earliest traceable use of the word ‘Hindu’ is to be found in the Zend Avesta as referring to the land of the seven rivers (Hapta Hindu being a corruption of Sapta Sindhu). A sixth-century BC inscription of Darius I mentions ‘Hidu’ in a list of countries, and clay tablets from Persepolis mention ‘Hi-in-tu’ to refer to India as mainly confined to the region of Sind. India was called al-Hind in pre-Islamic Arabia. After Muhammad ibn Qasim invaded Sind in 712 AD, he entered into the Brahmanabad settlement with the native non-Muslims of the land, who thus came to be known as Hindus. Thus, from a territorial connotation, the word ‘Hindu’ started acquiring a religious connotation, which became the well-accepted meaning of the word, albeit with some degree of ambiguity (for example, were the Buddhists to be called Hindus?), by the time Al Beruni was writing. Arvind Sharma, thus, points out, ‘The usage of the word Hindu in the subsequent period retains the two ambiguities (1) whether it refers to a region or a religion and (2) whether, as religion, it is to be understood in a centralist or pluralist manner’ (Sharma 2002, p. 9). The Hindus started referring to themselves as Hindus at least since the sixteenth century (Sharma 2002, pp. 13–14). Eventually, the word ‘Hindooism’ also came into existence when it was first used by Rammohan Roy in 1816. However, as noted above, the ambiguities of the term ‘Hindu’ continued to exist during the colonial period. The conceptual equivalence of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ continued as one heard of “Hindoo” Christians and “Hindoo” Muslims during the late eighteenth century (Frykenberg 2001, p. 85). Hence it is not surprising that in the usage by Bharatendu and Sir Syed Ahmad, the geographical connotation of the term was retained.

Gyan Pandey is right in pointing out that

many of the nineteenth century thinkers and publicists now claimed as the (modern) founders of the movement for Hindu nationhood functioned before the idea had gained the fixity of a popular prejudice that nations and nation-states are the only appropriate—the ‘natural’—form of the political existence of peoples. Not only is this obviously true in the case of people like Rammohan Roy who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is true in important ways for writers and thinkers of the latter half of the nineteenth century, who were quite evidently struggling with the question of how the ‘we’ of a possible Indian nationhood might be constituted.

(Pandey 1993, p. 244)

A couple of factors could have been at play for the conceptual contiguity, even convergence, of ‘Hindu’ and national. One was the nebulous nature of the term at that point of time, for the boundaries between communities and different groups were not yet sharp enough, and the exclusive ideology of communalism had not yet taken birth. Second, the way Dutt formulated the national being equivalent to the Hindu was the way it was usual to do in those days. The example of the Hindu Mela was discussed above. Another example is that, after his passing away, when Nivedita wrote his biographical sketch for the Modern Review in 1910, in the context of his History of Civilization in Ancient India, she spoke of ‘his discovery of the Indian mind, as revealed in ancient history and literature’ (Nivedita 1999, pp. 262–63, emphasis in original). What she meant was the Hindu mind6, but what she chose to pen down was ‘Indian’, because in this case, Hindu was equivalent to Indian, and the Bengali Hindu intellectuals of that age would not contest that7. To mention it as ‘Hindu’ would in fact appear as narrow-minded, and the national importance of this discovery could only be communicated by the term ‘Indian.’ However, it is important to remember that it is not in the same sense in which Hindu nationalism reduces Indian to Hindu that nationalist intellectuals like Dutt or Nivedita used the terms interchangeably.

Finally, in an article on ‘Nationalist Historians’, R C Majumdar noted that the ‘nationalist’ school of historiography emerged in colonial India as a reaction to histories of India written by European writers, who denigrated Hindu culture by ‘comparing the Hindu with the European culture by contrasting the worst features of the former with the best aspects of the latter’ (Majumdar 1961, p. 420). What he had to say about R C Dutt is worth reproducing here:

The results of the researches of these Indian scholars [who were trying to defend the glory of the Indian past] and a galaxy of distinguished oriental scholars of Europe were brought together in three compendious volumes entitled Civilization in Ancient India by R. C. Dutt… This may be regarded as the first nationalist history in the best sense of the term. It is ‘nationalist’ more in a negative than in a positive sense. In other words, it is free from the prejudiced outlook of European writers which had hitherto dominated the works of Indian history. But it is equally free from the extravagant nationalist sentiments of the Indians which were provoked by it. This does not mean that Mr. Dutt’s book is free from errors. But the errors are mostly those of judgement and ignorance of facts, and very rarely, if at all, the outcome of a preconceived national bias. This is best evidenced by the fact that the book did not fully satisfy either the Hindus or the Europeans. The orthodox Hindus held that life in the Vedic age was more spiritual, more pious, and contemplative in its tone and character, than that depicted in the book, and they refused to accept its account of the rude self-assertion and boisterous greed for conquests of the Vedic warriors. On the other hand, the Europeans took the opposite view. Dr. Kern observed, while reviewing the book, that ‘some scholars delight in describing all that was robust and manly and straightforward in the character of the Vedic Hindus, while others portray their coarseness and imperfections’. He was of opinion that Dutt adhered to the first school, but that the truth lies midway. Whatever we may think of Kern’s criticism, it has to be admitted that the rationalist outlook of Mr. Dutt is sadly lacking in much that was written by Indians in later times.

(Majumdar 1961, p. 421, emphasis added)

Incidentally, R C Majumdar begins this article on ‘nationalist’ historians of the modern period with the following observation: ‘Historiography was practically unknown to the Hindus at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Majumdar 1961, p. 416). Why did he use the word ‘Hindu’ instead of ‘Indian’, whereas what he meant was the nation and not the religious community? Majumdar was, we should remember, writing after Partition. He was witness to the bitter fact of communalism that R C Dutt was not. Then why does he invariably equate Hindu with Indian, whereas he should have been more poignantly aware of this pitfall? The clue lies in the passages that follow and that can also help partially explain why Dutt too often conflated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’. Majumdar writes that a nationalist historiography in India emerged essentially as a reaction and response to the defamation of Hindu religion and social organization in Indian history books written by the British. This is almost like saying that Indian nationalism arose partly in response to the denigration of Hindu religion and culture. Although this is not the only reason, this is one of the reasons behind the rise of Indian nationalism, at least among a particular segment of the Hindu population. This explains why Brahmo universalism could eventually culminate into the articulation of a national culture. Thus, even well-meaning Indian nationalists invariably used ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ interchangeably. Therefore, the past that Dutt sought to represent and implicitly defend had to necessarily be a Hindu past.

In Dutt’s case, religion and culture were enmeshed together. In the introductory section, it was mentioned that Sudhir Chandra points out that the strict distinction we make between economic and cultural nationalisms is fallacious. He writes that ‘even the beneficiaries of a liberal education in English, including some who embraced Christianity, subscribed with pride to the idea of a glorious Indian past’ and that R C Dutt’s nationalism was a critical example thereof (Chandra 2014, p. 65). We hail Dutt as an exponent of ‘economic nationalism’ in contradistinction to ‘cultural nationalism’; but ‘in actual fact Dutt contributed to the growth of nationalism in both its economic and cultural aspects, because for him the material and the cultural were inseparable constituents of Indian nationalism’ (Chandra 2014, p. 65, emphasis added). In other words, Dutt’s cultural nationalism was not divorced from his political nationalism; it was not a case of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. Instead of being hermetically sealed off from each other, the two were integral, and they fed into each other. For instance, in Three Years in Europe, while describing the election of 1868 in England, Dutt wrote, ‘Every man in this country considers himself as a constituent of a great nation, prides himself on his nationality and the glory of the nation, and therefore keeps an eye on the welfare of his country… the people are the Government’ (Dutt 1896b, pp. 13–14). Therefore, we see that the issues of the glory of the country, pride in the country (even if it is pride in the country’s political culture), and desire to work for the welfare of the country through political institutions are all interlinked.

The cultural and the political also intersect in other significant ways. For instance, in the vacuum created by the absence of a political conceptualization, cultural conceptualization will work in its place. Swarupa Gupta (2009) writes about the absence of the concept of a ‘nation’ in political terms in nineteenth-century Bengal. Referring to a speech by Manomohan Basu in the third session of the Hindu Mela, where the term swajati (one’s own jati, here meaning ‘nation’) was used, Gupta writes:

The swajati was taken to mean ‘nation’ defined in cultural terms. In the absence of a notion of or term for the state in abstract terms, there was no real concept of sovereignty objectively over territory and its citizens or subjects except in western vocabulary. This is why swajati was important, as something vested in the belonging-ness and identity of the people. It was therefore rather different from the political, judicial and juridical idea of nationalism.

(Gupta 2009, p. 23)

Thus, we come back to the point made initially that it is not possible to divorce cultural and political nationalisms. Even though nationalism can be expressed in political terms, the spirit behind such expression cannot be something dry, but something more human and living as culture. If we further elaborate on this, we should highlight the role of sentiment or emotions in the constitution of both culture and nationalism. That Dutt chose ‘literary patriotism’ as a medium rather than strict disciplinary history itself points towards the importance of emotions and sentiments in the formulation of such nationalism. Second, we cannot ignore the ubiquitousness of culture. Some cultural historians would even subsume politics and economics within the concept of ‘culture’. However, without going that far, it is enough to concede for the moment that there cannot be a purely political nationalism, or that culture constitutes an important component of all forms of nationalism.

Lastly, Tapan Raychaudhuri (2021) calls the construction of a self-conscious Hindu identity as part of the phenomenon of proto-nationalism. However, can one call Dutt a proto-nationalist? Ideas of political and economic nationalisms were fully developed in him. Hence, the only way is to accept that Hindu-ness was present in the formulation of Indian nationalism since the very beginning, even though we cannot call it Hindu nationalism in this form.

8. Conclusions

In conclusion, it may be summarized that the distinction we make today between cultural nationalism or nationalism with elements of religiocultural identity and a pure secular nationalism is a discursive construction of mainstream Indian nationalism since the 1920s. If we look closely at the nationalist discourses of the preceding period—from the late 1860s till the first decade of the twentieth century, we would find that Indian nationalism was invariably cultural nationalism with deep elements of religiocultural identity embedded in it. This is at least true of the Bengali intelligentsia, where ideas about Hindu religion and civilization were significant constituents of the nationalist discourse, which began with a quest for a national culture and identity. The paper shows through a case study of the literary and historical works of Romesh Chunder Dutt, who has generally been hailed as a champion of economic nationalism, that in him coexisted a secular and political variant of nationalism along with elements of cultural nationalism deeply defined in terms of Hindu identity and values. However, Dutt’s nationalism cannot be called Hindu nationalism as we understand it today, as it did not engage with the Muslim question in an exclusivist manner. Further, Dutt’s nationalism did not mobilize religion so much as religion per se, as it mobilized religious elements as part of a cultural identity. Finally, in Dutt’s ideas, there was no contradiction between political and cultural nationalisms; on the contrary, they fed into one another.