Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Why Bankim Chandra Chatterjee Dismissed the Claim of Mughals Being Colonisers

Bankim Chandra, a founding father of Hindu nationalism, described India under Pathan and Mughal rule as free, except under Aurangzeb.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks of India being under foreign occupation for a millennium, he echoes the 19th-century Hindu nationalist idea that “foreign rule” began with the defeat of the north Indian Hindu king Prithviraj Chauhan in 1192 and the subsequent establishment of the Ghorid dynasty in Delhi.

“We celebrated a remarkable journey of our 75 years of freedom after thousand years of foreign rule in one form or another,” Modi said while addressing a joint sitting of the US Congress in Washington DC in June.

The establishment of the Ghorid dynasty is considered the beginning and later spread of Muslim rulers in India, though early Muslim dynasties ruled only over some parts of the Indian subcontinent.

Looking at both Muslim rule and British rule as “foreign rule” started in the 19th century, initially during the Bengal Renaissance which later spread to other parts of the country. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, one of the founding fathers of Hindu nationalism who penned ‘Vande Mataram’, had a very different view of history.

He elaborated his understanding of independence and subjugation in two different essays, both originally published in the literary journal Bangadarshan – which he edited for four years from 1872. He later selected them for the second volume of his essay collection, Bibidho Probondho.

In the essay titled ‘Bharatbarsher Swadhinota O Poradhinota’ (India’s independence and subjugation), Chatterjee categorically stated that he would consider a nation to be ‘subjugated’ only when a foreign ruler discriminated between subjects of their own nationality and the native people.

“A nation does not become subjugated just because the ruler belongs to a different nationality,” he wrote, and added, “I will call that land subjugated where the foreign ruler discriminates between people of their own nationality and the native people. The land which is free from the oppression of other nationalities is independent.”

That Chatterjee is one of BJP’s ideological gurus was made clear in no uncertain terms in 2018, when Amit Shah – the current Union home minister who was then president of the BJP – told a gathering in Kolkata, “Our nationalism is cultural nationalism and Bankim Chandra is the fountainhead.”

Leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological and organisational parent of the BJP, have on numerous occasions described their ideology, Hindutva, as ‘Hindu cultural nationalism.’

Chatterjee’s concept of national freedom, however, is quite contrary to the one preached by today’s Hindu nationalists.

The novelist argued that Britain could not be said to have been under foreign rule during the reign of the 18th-century kings George I and II, who were of German nationality, or the 17th-century king William III, who was of Dutch origin. Therefore, there was no way India under Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) or Bengal under Nawab Alivardi Khan (1740-1756) could be called colonies, he argued.

He extended the argument further in another essay, titled ‘Bangalar Itihas’ (History of Bengal), where he described Bengal under Pathan rule as free but as subjugated under the Mughal rule, especially from Akbar’s time. His understanding was the same – a land cannot be called to be subjugated only because the ruler belongs to a different nationality.

Throughout the book, he uses the word nationality instead of religion, race, or ethnicity.

“Bengal did not have the bad experience of enslaved states during the times of the independent Pathan rulers… one of the prime outcomes of subjugation is known to be the loss of mental energy of the enslaved nation. Bengal’s mental splendour became only brighter during the Pathan rule. Two of Bengal’s greatest poets, Vidyapati and Chandidas, appeared in this period. And Emperor Akbar whom we highly praise is Bengal’s nemesis. He was the first to actually subjugate the Bengalis,” he wrote.

The Pathan rulers lived in Bengal and Bengal’s money did not go Delhi or Agra’s way during their rule, Chatterjee argued. Akbar’s annexation of Bengal meant subjugation because Bengal’s wealth started flowing out of the state.

Similarly, the Mughals did not send money to any faraway home of theirs. It needs to be noted that Chatterjee rejects Aurangzeb (1658-1707) from a different perspective – that of discriminating between the subjects on the basis of nationality (read religion here) – but never says India’s wealth was being taken outside India.

Aurangzeb is known to have imposed the jizya tax on non-Muslim subjects, which is one of the reasons his rule comes under frequent criticism.

Group portrait of Mughal rulers, from Babur to Aurangzeb, with the Mughal ancestor Timur seated in the middle. On the left: Shah Jahan, Akbar and Babur, with Abu Sa’id of Samarkand and Timur’s son, Miran Shah. On the right: Aurangzeb, Jahangir and Humayun, and two of Timur’s other offspring Umar Shaykh and Muhammad Sultan. Created c. 1707–12. Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0 igo

Chatterjee identified England under Norman rule (1071-1154), northern India under Qutb ud-Din Aibak (1206-1210), and India under Aurangzeb as subjugation. “We call India under Akbar rule as independent and free,” he clarifies.

It is this understanding of independence from the perspective of discrimination that prompts him to declare India under European rule as beneficial for the majority of Indians – except only for the Brahmins and the Savarna – as he found that caste discrimination under Brahmanical rule more oppressive for the masses than the British rule.

“Under English rule, the natives and the Britons have separate courts. English judges can convict a native but a native judge can not convict an English person. There are not many discriminatory systems greater than this. But far greater discrimination can be observed under Brahmanical rule,” he wrote in ‘Bharatbarsher Swadhinota O Poradhinota’.

Chatterjee explained that the English may have had separate courts for them but the law remained the same – if a native killer of an English person is worthy of capital punishment, so is a Britisher for killing a native. “But under Brahmanical rule, there is a great difference in the punishment meant for a shudra who killed a Brahmin and a Brahmin who murdered a shudra,” he wrote.

He then asks a potentially troubling question for the proponents of Ram Rajya: “Babu Dwarakanath Mitra has illuminated the face of modern India by sitting in the Supreme Court – where would he have been in ‘Ramrajya’?”

Chatterjee argued that the nationality of the oppressor did not matter to the oppressed. “In place of domination of a nationality, as seen in modern India, ancient India had caste dominance. For the majority of the people, they are no different,” he wrote, adding that if modern India was being oppressed by the (foreign) masters, ancient India was ‘highly oppressed’ by the Brahmins.

“It is therefore concluded that the Brahmins and the Kshratriyas, i.e. the upper caste, have experienced deterioration in modern India, but the shudras or the ordinary subjects have experienced some upliftment,” Chatterjee wrote.

His arguments stand in stark contrast to the recent Hindu nationalist spree of erasing Mughal history through the renaming of places and architecture and omitting that period from school textbooks.

Earlier this year, when the iconic Mughal Garden at Rashtrapati Bhavan was rechristened as Amrit Udyan, Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan wrote on Twitter, “This new name not only shreds yet another symbol of a colonial relic but also reflects India’s aspirations for the Amrit Kaal.”

Chatterjee was not the only Indian freedom fighter who had such views. Mohandas Gandhi’s 1909 book, Hind Swaraj, identified Mughal rule as Indian, and nationalist leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru held the same view.

Tagore’s Critique of the Modern Condition

Tagore believed that modernity ought to be embraced in a manner that “minimise[s] the immense sacrifice of man’s life and freedom that it claims in its every movement.”

In Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama Tasher Desh (translated into English as The Land of Cards), the subjects of the House of Cards follow seemingly absurd rules because “[i]t’s the law.” Laughter, among other things, is forbidden on this land. The Card Race have learnt to “go by the book”, “follow the beaten track”, be “[e]ver-docile”, and simply “follow the leader.” It takes two foreigners in the form of a prince and a merchant to bring about the winds of change in the land of cards that ultimately lead to the breakdown of the political order and free the Card Race from the fetters of tyranny. This work of Tagore’s, written in the year Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, was dedicated to Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist who would later ally with German fascists in his failed attempt to free India from British rule.

Perhaps more than anybody else, Tagore understood and acknowledged the significance of the foreigner in his home country. It was his belief that the single “most significant fact” of his day was that “the West ha[d] met the East.” A meeting of the West and the East, as Tagore would have it, implied a spiritual union between men who had come together on an equal footing. For Tagore, had India not come into contact with Europe, “She would have lacked an element essential for her attainment of perfection.” What disturbed him, however, was that the West had come to India not with its “humanity” but its “machine.”

Herein lies his critique of the modern condition. The ‘machine’ that Tagore refers to is the nation-state model (and its accompanying paraphernalia) imposed on India by the coloniser. As noted by, for instance, Sudipta Kaviraj, modernity imposed by way of colonialism cannot and does not fulfil its historical purpose of liberating humankind.

Tagore as well as other greats of the Bengal Renaissance like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Jagadish Chandra Bose, among others, were products of colonial modernity. All these men negotiated with this modern condition on their own terms in their own very different ways, and it is not my intention to categorise them together without being mindful of the differences in their approaches. There were, quite naturally, some parallels, too, in how they made sense of this modernity as it unfolded in Bengal.

Kaviraj, for example, points out that both Bankim Chandra and Rabindranath in their writings tried to convey that “modern and English speaking were not necessary equivalents.” Tagore, in fact, made a distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘European.’ He articulated to his Japanese audience thus:

Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans, or in the hideous structures where their children are interned when they take their lessons…. These are not modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.

Tagore believed that modernity ought to be embraced in a manner that “minimise[s] the immense sacrifice of man’s life and freedom that it claims in its every movement.” He was attentive to the toll that the supposed by-product of modernity called nationalism was claiming, lecturing as he was in the midst of the Great War. Again, Tagore’s disapproval of this one aspect of Western modernity, namely nationalism, does not lead him to reject its other aspects that comprised “[a]bove all things” the “banner of liberty” – “liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and action, liberty in the ideals of art and literature”, which is curiously why, for him, the way for Europe to redeem itself is through European ideals itself (such as liberty) after Europe has been judged “before her own tribunal and put…to shame.”

For, Tagore, materialism can never be the basis for any enduring union of peoples. Credit: Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

It is all too well known that Europe historically has had a proclivity for monochromatism. This was dreadfully witnessed in the many projects of nation- and state-building undertaken as part of a modernising Europe which attempted to homogenise populations within respective sovereign boundaries. This was done with the objective of stamping out any potential attempt at sectarian (or other) opposition in future. Thus, in post-revolutionary France, Napoléon considered it his foremost duty to create nationalist Frenchmen. This was echoed by Massimo d’Azeglio who, following the Italian Risorgimento, famously remarked, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” Tagore was attentive to this when he wrote: “When differences are too jarring, man cannot accept them as final; so, either he wipes them out with blood, or coerces them in some kind of superficial homogeneity, or he finds out a deeper unity which he knows is the highest truth.” That ‘truth’ (another Tagorean motif) was what had led India to choose the last alternative in its attempt to address its “immense mass of heterogeneity” by “successive…expansion and contraction of her ideals.”

Tagore believed that, unlike India, Europe had fewer differences to begin with. Here, he was thinking not just in racial terms but also with regard to “their ideals of life” where “western peoples are so near each other that practically they are acting as one in building up their civilisation.” Ultimately, for him, “civilisations are mixed products. Only barbarism is simple, monadic and unalloyed.”

Tagore’s critique of modernity also includes a critique of scientism and the perils of placing too much faith in science. He was well aware of how the “pursuit of science” had been closely tied to the evolution of political liberty in Europe. Science had liberated Europeans from “nameless fears” and informed them to value its laws over arbitrary ones set by despotic rulers and to desist from an excessive dependence on providence. Modern science had greatly benefited the human race and allayed its “sufferings”, but it was also being used instrumentally for enhancing “selfish power” which had ended up making “war and preparation for war the normal condition of all nations.” An overemphasis on science that ignored nature and its laws had only served to “violently [divert] Europe’s attention to gaining things in place of inner perfection.”

Marshall Berman has written about the tendency of modernity to crush not just what is seemingly “traditional” and “pre-modern” but that which is modern itself. In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, he talks about the figure of Robert Moses – architect and planner of modern New York City – who affected the lives of so many New Yorkers, especially the most vulnerable who were already experiencing life on the margins of the metropolis, through his construction of “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centres.” Berman grew up in the Bronx and he recollects Moses’ plans for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a structure whose construction demanded that entire neighbourhoods be rammed through. The project went ahead without a care for the occupants of the affected neighbourhoods, for the modern narrative held that to oppose such acts was equivalent “to oppose history, progress, modernity itself.” Some of the buildings in the neighbouring Grand Concourse boulevard which, for Berman’s family, “represented a pinnacle of modernity” fell victim to Moses’ expressway.

For Tagore, cities everywhere from “San Francisco to London, from London to Tokyo” seemed to convey a routine physiognomy. His favourable disposition towards rural Bengal and lack of affection for Calcutta – an “upstart town” with pitiable “manners” – is well known; he once recoiled with horror upon noticing factories erected on either side of the Ganges. For all his critique of urbanism, Tagore was quite clear what the role of cities ought to be which, for him, was to “enrich the entire society.” ‘Greed’ on the part of modern towns and cities was anti-democratic. Tagore sadly reminisced about “sky-scrapers frown[ing]” on him during one of his stays in “the giant’s Castle of Wealth…America.” Following his experience, one can almost imagine the following words of his as being addressed to Robert Moses:

[It should be] realise[d] that the mere process of addition [does] not create fulfilment; that mere size of acquisition [does] not produce happiness; that greater velocity of movement [does] not necessarily constitute progress and that change [can] only have meaning in relation, to some clear ideal of completeness.

In his lectures on nationalism, Tagore critiques, among other things, rampant commercialism which follows the spread of modern capital. Another related aspect of Tagore’s understanding of modernity is that he is, most crucially, critical towards a utilitarian treatment of humankind and human relations. The modern project promotes the utilisation of man as material. When socialist Russia valorised the ‘Stakhanovite’ or capitalist America romanticised the ‘working class hero’, they were but only overindulging in this very embedded feature of modernity. Tagore believed that humans could only be perfectly revealed spiritually and not materially. This is why he blamed the unhappiness that the modern age had left in its wake not so much on material poverty but a loss of people’s humanity. In other words, an estrangement of humans from their spiritual bonds – which, for Tagore, was the only real universal – had caused humankind’s depressing state of existence in the last century. Just as science had released man from the shackles of ignorance and absolutism, so too had commerce served as a powerful thrust for his progress but it had to be kept in mind that the domain of both science and commerce was the ‘material world.’

Peace, according to Tagore, could only come about once men realised their ‘spiritual unity’ with other men. It was futile for a warring Europe to build peace on a foundation of science and trade. Tagore, therefore, can be read as a critic of functionalism (particularly when it overplays the role of commerce) which, as David Mitrany states, “emphasises the common index of need.” Functionalists expect inter-state cooperation in the fulfilment of such needs (whether of a material or technical nature) to lead to stronger ties among states. For, Tagore, though, materialism can never be the basis for any enduring union of peoples.

Arko Dasgupta is with the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.