Book Review: Righteous Republic; The Political Foundations of Modern India

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India

By Ananya Vapeyi

Vajpeyi’s ‘Righteous Republic’ is a challenging, but extremely rewarding read and an important contribution to the growing body of Indian intellectual scholarship. The book has as its primary aim the explication of the term ‘swaraj’ or self-rule. In critiquing both past and present scholarship in the area, Vajpeyi argues that scholars have focused inordinately on what the concept of political sovereignty entailed for India’s founding fathers without paying sufficient attention to the first portion of the term, namely the self. How exactly did India’s leading nationalist thinkers conceive of the relationship between self and sovereignty? What did the swa in swa-raj mean to them and how did they go about conferring content on that term? These are hugely important questions but have, as the author persuasively argues, been inadequately addressed in much of the literature on India’s intellectual history. In reading the search for the self through India’s founders, Vajpeyi focuses on five thinkers: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore.

The author argues that the search for the self ‘took the form of an attempt to recover a line of moral inquiry from a welter of Indian traditions’. Vajpeyi suggests that traditions are text-centric; that is to say, texts constitute the building blocks of tradition. This characterization of traditions as text-centric may come across to some readers as inordinately parochial buts its persuasiveness as a characterization need not detain us here- what is important is that once Vajpeyi characterizes traditions in the way that she does, she can then proceed to argue that the best or most insightful way of tracing the founders’ search for self is to examine the manner in which they engaged with particular Indic texts of premodernity. Vajpeyi writes: ‘Rather than trying to figure out where the five founders stood with regard to the idea of “Tradition” as such, I examine particular intellectual engagements with traditional texts that each one undertook, and bring out the categories of selfhood that emerged from these acts of interpretation’.

So what are these texts that India’s founders are said to have engaged with in their attempt to search for the self- the self whose political sovereignty they all struggled to reinstate. Vajpeyi argues that Gandhi’s search for the self is brought out most clearly and compellingly in his engagement with the Bhagavad Gita; Nehru’s search is clarified by looking at his engagement with the texts and artifacts of the Mauryan Empire. Kalidasa’s Meghadhuta is the relevant text for Rabindranath, Abanindranath’s search is reflected in his conceptualization of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal and finally; Ambedkar’s agonizing search for the self is best explicated by examining his engagement with the classical texts of Buddhism.

The claim that the political foundations of modern India derived from classical and historical Indian intellectual traditions is not a new one; the beauty and importance of Vajpeyi’s book, however, lies in its meticulous explication of the ways in and terms on which which India’s founders engaged with the rich knowledge traditions of their past. In fashioning a sense of Indian selfhood, these leading thinkers utilized the vocabularies, themes and concepts embedded in the text-rich traditions of India’s past, employing them in inventive ways to address problems that those traditions had probably not envisaged themselves. The founders engagement with Indian texts of premodernity and their employment of indigenous conceptual categories and idioms to deal with the ‘crisis of the self’ and the issue of political sovereignty enabled them collectively to formulate their values and visions in ways that were intelligible to the Indian masses who although themselves participants in the swaraj project lacked the resources by which to articulate the precise nature of their existential predicament.

Vajpeyi’s book is a thoroughgoing attempt to demonstrate the ways in which India’s rich intellectual, aesthetic and moral heritage influenced the Indian founders collective search for selfhood. In this attempt, the book succeeds masterfully.