Review: Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood

Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood by Sugata Bose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is much of value in Sugata Bose’s latest book, ‘The Nation as Mother’. The book comprises an assortment of essays, all of which focus, some more tangentially than others, on the theme of nationalism and the formation of the nation-state. The book’s title comes from the defining chapter of the volume in which Bose interrogates ‘the sacred biography of the Mother’ - the provenance and history of the maternal metaphor in India’s national consciousness. The metaphor of ‘nation as mother’ was formed in the intellectually fertile terrain of Bengal and inspired creativity in provincial and nation-wide expressions of nationalisms through a litany of art forms including literature, poetry, music and painting. Bose’s incisive narrative brings to light the historical and enduring unease that Indian Muslims have had with the maternal symbol and its overtly religious symbolism and use. Bose’s fascinating study of Aurobindo sheds light on the latter’s political and religious philosophy and represents a much-needed corrective against recent attempts by secularist historians to paint Aurobindo in communal and sectarian colors. Throughout his volume, Bose cautions against the seemingly dominant tendency of viewing Indian nationalist thought through the prism of European discourse. Treating the former as derivative of the latter has resulted, Bose argues, in a vacuum of native subjectivity. In seeking to rescue Indian intellectual history from its impoverished state, Bose invites readers to consider the extent to which modern Indian nationalism drew significantly on rich legacies of precolonial regional patriotisms, kept alive through a ‘constant process of creative innovation’. In many respects, Bose would have done well here to engage more robustly with the recent work of Ananya Vajpeyi who does more than Bose to demonstrate how the creative engagement with precolonial patriotisms shaped and informed colonial and post-colonial Indian nationalisms. That said, Bose’s analysis reminds us that Indian history provides for a rich diversity of nationalisms and that there is nothing particularly indigenous or inevitable about the oppressive, parochial and exclusionary-based nationalism that informs India’s contemporary political discourse. Bose argues, correctly in my view, that our national project today should be about recovering a more generously formed vision of national belonging and patriotism that does, among other things, justice to the spirit of cosmopolitanism that permeates the writings of thinkers that Tagore and Aurobindo.

Several of the essays in the volume deal with Partition. Bose attributes significant responsibility to the Congress Party and its commitment to a “monolithic concept of sovereignty borrowed for modern Europe” for the eventual dismemberment of India. Bose argues that the Congress Party’s lust for power denied the multiple identities and several-layered sovereignties that had characterized India’s pre-colonial past. Bose’s criticism of the Congress Party’s (and the Hindu Mahasabha’s) role in bringing about Partition must be seen in light of his Bose’s treatment of Jinnah’s culpability and role regarding the same. Bose’s account of Jinnah (and of the Congress Party) is consistent with Professor Ayesha Jalal’s thesis (Sugata Bose is married to Ayesha Jalal) which holds that Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan was merely a bargaining chip to be used against the Congress with the aim of securing a more federated post-colonial India. While scholarship in this area remains (to some degree) in a state of flux, recent scholarship does more than enough to undermine Jalal’s central claims. For example, in reviewing Venkat Dhulipala’s 2015 book, ‘Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Colonial North India’, Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that the book ‘decisively demolishes Ayesha Jalal’s idea that Pakistan arose in a fit of ideological absentmindedness, a stratagem in a bargaining game gone awry.’ Dhulipala’s book convincingly argues that the idea of Pakistan, an Islamic state that is both a homeland for Muslims and the vehicle for regeneration in Islam, had deep roots in political, theological and literary debates (in other words, giving lie to the oft-quoted assertion that Pakistan’s problem was that it was ‘insufficiently imagined’). The final section of the book contains a transcribed selection of Bose’s Lok Sabha speeches. Commenting on the controversy over Jaswant Singh’s eulogistic portrayal of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Bose writes that ‘majoritanism, whether in secular or saffron garb, continues to be a potential threat to Indian democracy. Regional rights were once thought to be a counterpoise to the anti-democratic tendencies of an over-centralized state. Regional parties run by petty and insecure dictators are proving to be as ruthless as the all-India parties in the suppression of internal dissent’. I wonder who Bose had in mind when he wrote these words; isn’t it ironic how this would strike most readers as a particularly apt description of his own party, the Trinamool Congress and his party leader, Mamata Bannerjee.


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