Ananya Vajpeyi. Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 368 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04895-9.

Reviewed by Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand)
Published on H-Asia (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)

The story of Indian nationalism has been told in comedic, tragic, and ironic modes, and historians of South Asia have laid bare the aspirations, machinations, and rebellions of the elite and subaltern alike. However, there have been far too few studies of the central categories around which nationhood was imagined, in other words, an intellectual history of the idea of the nation. Gandhian nationalism (notions of Ram Rajya and trusteeship), Muslim nationalism (from Iqbal to Jinnah), subaltern nationalism, and Marxisant analyses of the passive revolution have given us a narrative of Indian actions over a century. Given the elitist nature of our historiography, histories of ideas have concentrated on the big men (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mohammad Iqbal, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and more recently Bhimrao Ambedkar and have presumed that intellection is not a subaltern predilection. The questions for an intellectual history are complex: who should be studied; what should be studied (texts as much as beliefs and practices); what temporality should we work with (should the precolonial start from the Vedas?); is there one tradition or many (Vedic, Upanisadic, Sufi, indigenous Christianity, popular practices); and so on. To assume an Indic tradition is a beginning but perhaps a wrong path to travel on since we have a miscegenated diversity of thought in India.

Ananya Vajpeyi’s book works with a singular idea of an Indic tradition that she perceives as being in a crisis in the confrontation with colonialism. She takes up Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nehru, and Ambedkar, on account of “ways in which these men were not, intellectually Europeans,” and studies their thought through concepts that ostensibly act as a condensation of their histories of intellection (p. 29). Of course, this is a heuristic device; these concepts need not be seen as central to the thought of any of these individuals. It is just that Vajpeyi carries out an intellectual exercise where she asks the question: what if we were to think through the oeuvre of these individuals through just this one concept? So far, so good. However, the essays glide over the surface of the writings and thought, avoiding the rigors of serious and textured engagement. She includes a poem here, a few paintings there, and references to works without citation from them or engaged explication. The word “apodictic” comes to mind often: we have to take the opinions offered on trust and assume that the author knows what she is talking about. And sometimes when we encounter sentences like “in converting to Buddhism [Ambedkar] wanted to pull into an empty spot in the parking lot of tradition” (p. 234), our hearts can only be filled with misgivings.

Before we go on to look at individual readings, there are some characteristic moves that are inherent in Vajpeyi’s method of reading. The first is to take a well-worked-out argument by a scholar and build a set of nested observations around that. In her reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s Meghadut (1889), Sudipto Kaviraj’s analysis of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta (1976) is at the heart of the argument. The insights, if any, come from the opinions she hitchhikes on rather than from her own cogitation. The central premise of the argument about Tagore is that he was not a Nationalist and was deeply conscious of the aporias of any transcendent ideology. Ashis Nandy has made this argument at great length and more subtly in his book on Tagore, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (1994). Nandy’s book is not cited in the text or in the footnotes. The second move is to give an outline of an argument to suggest a deep engagement with an author’s oeuvre, as in the suggestion that Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946) and Glimpses of World History (1934) are part of a triad that includes his letters to his chief ministers in the states in India. We have to take this on trust since the author gives us her opinion on the letters without quotation or any engagement with the letters whatsoever. The third feature is the recurrent use of phrases like “without going into the details of this work,” “a theme I cannot pursue at any length,” “I cannot take this up in detail here,” or “I do not have space to reprise her argument here” (pp. 217, 233, 117), which is an indication of the great speed at which the book was written as well as the author’s impatience with thinking anybody or anything through. Finally, there is the peculiar strategy of assertion (“in my opinion”) and of unbounded speculation that substitutes for careful argument. For example, there is the guesswork as to why Ambedkar did not convert his followers to the Kabirpanth, the religious community founded by the bhakti poet Kabir. The author offers the opinion that Ambedkar “did not trust his followers to be able to keep Kabir apart from mainstream Hinduism.” No evidence is offered for this assertion. She brings up Hazari Prasad Dwivedi’s “monumental” work on Kabir (no discussion is offered on why it is monumental) and then goes on to say that perhaps Dwivedi’s reading alienated Ambedkar, or “perhaps he never had the opportunity to read this ground breaking book”! The paragraph ends with a stunning denouement. The author says that it is likely that the fact that it was Tagore who had published an English selection of Kabir may have “put Ambedkar off.” She adds disarmingly, “This is of course pure speculation on my part” (p. 226)!

Gandhi is read through the idea of ahimsa (nonviolence); Rabindranath Tagore through viraha, the longing brought about by separation (nationalism as a perpetually deferred ideal); Abanindranath Tagore through samvega, the shock of aesthetic recognition (the plight of the dying Shah Jahan which he paints as an existential dilemma for all Indians); Nehru through dharma­­, a political and cosmic morality of responsibility (invoked through the figure of Ashoka); and Ambedkar through duhkkha, sorrow born of suffering (embodied in his reworking of Buddhism as a modern theodicy for the untouchables of India). These are arbitrary yet excellent prisms through which to view the thinking of any of these intellectuals. However, the author is too impatient with ideas; she does not pursue an insight once it is sighted on the horizon. So we get reworkings of existing interpretations of Gandhi as a philosopher of nonviolence. There is little engagement with the profundity of his insistence on the possibility of provoking violence toward self as a premise of political action, as Faisal Devji has powerfully argued recently in his The Impossible Indian (2012). 

It is in the chapter on Ambedkar that the problems with this speed reading of Indian intellectual history come to the fore. There is no attempt to closely read Ambedkar’s Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) (a text left unfinished at his death) for elaborating the idea of duhkkha. Instead we have a number of assertions about Ambedkar, his method, his lack of imagination and empathy with the poetry of Buddhism, and so on. These are mere assertions, as one would make around a coffee table with one’s cronies, since there is not one single exposition of the text itself in the chapter. The author, when she deals with Ambedkar’s thinking on Buddhism, is content to cite secondary work by Sangharakshita and rely on the telling therein. When there is a move toward some kind of engagement, this is hastily disavowed: “without going into the details of [the] work” (p. 213), the author gives us an apodictic sentence about Ambedkar’s classic text on the untouchables. The argument that Ambedkar “eviscerates Buddhism” and “renders Buddhism unrecognizable as itself” is risible and evidence enough that the author has not read the lapidary and emotional formulations in Buddha and His Dhamma (p. 211). An instance of the author’s complete ignorance of the historiography around an issue is when she avers that “it appears that Buddhism enjoyed a widespread renaissance in twentieth century India” (p. 217). This seems to suggest that this is a flash of intuition on the author’s part. Actually, it arises from a lack of reading. Apart from Charles Allen’s popular books, Aloysius’s magnificent work on Iyothee Thass, and PhDs on Rahul Sanskritayana and Anagarika Dharmapala (none of which are cited), there is research enough to make concrete arguments on the theme of the reemergence of Buddhism in the early twentieth-century Indian imagination.

This book (which puzzlingly comes with fulsome encomiums by leading scholars) is an exemplar of how intellectual history ought not to be done.

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Citation: Dilip Menon. Review of Vajpeyi, Ananya, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. February, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40651

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