Nationalist Collective Conclave: India Beyond Colonial Narratives | Hindol Sengupta

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:06]among the leading voices in this intellectual movement. A noted historian, author, public intellectual.

[00:00:14]He has written extensively on Indian history, leadership and civilizational identity.

[00:00:22]And through his work, he has explored stories of India that often remain outside the conventional narratives.

[00:00:29]stories that are rooted in Indian thought, resilience and cultural continuity. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage historian and author Mr. Hindel Singh Gupta.

[00:00:44]>> Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

[00:00:47]Thank you to Arnab Gowami and the republic for giving me this opportunity to speak at the nationalist collective.

[00:00:54]I thought ladies and gentlemen today I will talk to you about why India should not be afraid of nationalism. This is a particularly pertinent question. A question that comes up again and again especially as India deals with the world because in the west especially in Europe there is a palpable concern always about the word nationalism and nationalists and because of their own history. The west is unable to comprehend that their experience could be different from the experience of other parts of the world.

[00:01:29]And therefore the west especially in Europe do not like the word nationalist do not like the word nationalism. But that cannot be our experience. That cannot be our history. Our history fundamentally is different. Our cultural roots are fundamentally different. Our experience lived experience as sociologists like to say is fundamentally different. Let me begin ladies and gentlemen then with the provocation.

[00:01:57]About 250 years ago, in April 1775, a portly opinionated English essaist named Samuel Johnson sat in a London club and declared with the smug confidence of somebody who lived in a country that had never been colonized that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

[00:02:23]That line as always as always in India has been repeated again and again and is continued to be repeated today. Even today opeds and columns and essays and all kinds and articles all kinds of things even in India repeat this line to prove a point that patriotism is fundamentally something to use that terrible um you know social media phrase. It is a doglapun as it were of sorts. It is supposedly patriotism is supposedly something that covers many illnesses, many non virtues so to speak. Quite on the contrary, quite on the contrary, there is a different idea that emerged in India and I think at the moment of a far more searching observation made not in 1775 in England in London but in 1931 in Bengal. The philosopher Krishna Chandra Badachara, one of the deepest minds modern India has produced, delivered a lecture called saraj in ideas. He argued that it's not enough to have saraj in the material sense to have your own government to have your own military to have be in control of your economy. But before all of that or underguarding all of that, one must have swar in ideas.

[00:04:00]Listen to what he wrote in that essay.

[00:04:04]Political subjugation primarily means restraint on the outer life of a people.

[00:04:09]And although it tends gradually to sink into the inner life of the soul, the fact that one is conscious of it operates against the tendency. Cultural subjugation is ordinarily of an unconscious character. It implies slavery from a from the very start.

[00:04:30]This cultural subjugation comes at the cost of one's traditional cast of ideas and sentiments. And it is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost. Mark that phrase, ladies and gentlemen.

[00:04:52]Possessed like a ghost.

[00:04:54]I believe this is what colonialism is.

[00:04:57]It is an idea. It is something that possesses a culture like a ghost. And we are still in the thrs of of a colonial framework in India. We are trying to break out of it. But in many ways we are fundamentally captured by that idea. We are stuck to that idea.

[00:05:18]Now when an Indian stands in free and independent India today and repeats Samuel Johnson's dismissal of patriotism without interrogating its context, without asking whose idea it is, whose purpose it serves, that is precisely the kind of cultural subjugation Casey Bhachara was talking about. You cannot borrow ideas mindlessly and paste it, copy paste if you will in the in the parliament of our digital age. You cannot copy paste frameworks from another part of the world and put it on your context without understanding what it is all about. And therefore today I want to make the case clearly historically and without apology for why India is not afraid cannot be afraid should not be afraid and will never be afraid or apologetic about its nationalism.

[00:06:19]We are unapologetic about our nationalism. We will always remain unafraid and unapologetic about expressing that nationalism. And why is that true? Because without nationalism, ladies and gentlemen, without nationalism, there would be no free India. You and I would not be sitting here. But before we go into that, let's examine why the West fears nationalism.

[00:06:48]To understand why India is different, we must first understand why the West is so afraid. Europe's history of nationalism is frankly a horror story. It is a horror story that they wrote themselves.

[00:07:01]Let's go back to 1618. The Austrian Hapsburg decide that they must impose Roman Catholicism on their Protestant subjects to impose a different kind of imperial and religious framework. This overreach created something that we later called and came to be known as the 30 years war. For 30 years, Catholics and Protestant fought hand in hand as it were against each other. They fought one of the most bloody, the most vicious conflicts Protestant against against Catholics, fighting it out to regain in a sense their control of a particular kind of religious identity. They were looking to establish their own particular religious identity which killed. Remember what the 30 years war did? 30 years of slaughter, 30 years of plague, 30 years of famine that killed a quarter and a third of an entire population of central Europe.

[00:08:09]When it finally ended with the treaty of Westfailia in 1648, Europe had created the blueprint of the modern nation state. But that blueprint from the beginning was stained with blood.

[00:08:24]Fast forward two centuries later and you find the French Revolution which began with the magnificent cry of liberty, equality and fraternity and ended with the guillotine.

[00:08:38]Napoleon rode uh those revolutionary nationalist energies to conquer most of Europe leaving a trail of devastation that reshaped the continent.

[00:08:48]And then came the 20th century, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, the rise of Hitler in Germany, who weaponized national pride into the machinery of the Holocaust. 6 million Jews, 5 million others murdered in an industrial assembly line of death. The bombing of London, British imperialism in Asia, the bombing of the Pearl Harbor, and of course, at the very end, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the apocalyptic finale of nationalist ambition taken to its monstrous extreme. Is it any wonder then, ladies and gentlemen, that Europe is afraid of the nationalism word of the nationalist tendencies? They have faced bloodshed of a kind, they have seen bloodshed and slaughter of a kind that few others have seen in the history of humankind. And which is why Europe even today shuddters at nationalism.

[00:09:48]In the decades since, American foreign policy has added a new chapter to the story. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, all justified in the language of national interest, freedom, a civilizational mission or a civilizing mission, if you will. The West's relationship with nationalism is therefore traumatized and for good reason. But India's relationship is different. It must be different. India did not use nationalism to conquer.

[00:10:18]India used nationalism to survive.

[00:10:21]Without nationalism, fundamentally India would have not survived.

[00:10:28]There is a young man I want you to think about. His name is Kodiram Bose. He was 18 years old, only 18 when he was hung by the British in 1908 for throwing bombs at a carriage he believed carried a tyrannical judge. He went to the gallows smiling. Some say he went to the gallows with the Bhagat Gita in his lips and his hands in his arms. His co-conspirator Proful Loaki shot himself rather than be captured.

[00:11:05]There was Vasuv Balvant Patk, a man who gave up a government job, took to the forest of Maharashtra and raised an armed revolt in 1879, decades before the Indian National Congress had even had its first session.

[00:11:20]He died in a British prison in Eden. He was forgotten for a century. But his patriotism remains not only not forgotten but remains parti particularly pertinently palpably alive among us today.

[00:11:41]And then think of Bhagat Singh 23 years old when he was hung in Lahor central jail on March 23rd 1931. He was an atheist, a socialist and an Indian nationalist all at once.

[00:11:56]His patriotism was about dignity. And then think about Bal Gangadar Tilik Lok Manya Tilak who electrified a whole nation with words so simple that every farmer and factory worker could feel them in their bones. Swaraj is my birthright. I shall have it.

[00:12:19]These were not scoundrels, ladies and gentlemen. Our nationalists, unlike what Samuel Johnson said, were far far away from scoundrels. These were men and women who for all practical purposes in many ways were saints. It is because of their sacrifice, their unrelent, their absolute complete surrender to the idea that mother India must be at all cost be made independent, given new dignity away from colonial rule. That each one of you, each one of you today are sitting in this hall in central Delhi.

[00:13:06]What were these saints fighting for?

[00:13:10]Rishiorindu, revolutionary, philosopher, sage, answered that question definitively in June 1907 when he wrote what he called a defense of legitimate patriotism. He asked if it is patriotic for an Englishman to say that England shall never lie at the feet of a conqueror. If that's patriotic, why is it sedicious for an Indian to say the same thing? Why must our patriotism be different or analyzed in different ways than the patriotism of an English person?

[00:13:54]If it is noble, asked Orurobindo, for a Roman to die defending his father's causes, traditions, his father's ashes, as you will, his father's entire legacy, the legacy of his ancestors. If it is noble for the Roman to defend this tradition, this legacy, why must it be called madness for an Indian to be same impulse?

[00:14:29]But it was Orurubindo freshly released I'm sorry from Alipur central Alipur jail after a year's detention who spoke the words that define India's nationalist creed he stood at Uttarpara and said I spoke once before with this force in me and I said then that this movement is not a political movement creed or faith and I say it again today. But I put it in a different way, another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith. I say it is the sanatan dharma for which and which for us is nationalism. The Hindu nation was born with the sanatan dharma. With it it moves and with it it grows. When the sonatines then the nation declines.

[00:15:27]Natan Dharma were capable of perishing then of course in many ways Shiorabindu suggested in his utara speech the nation would perish for us then patriotism is not the refuge of the scoundrel it is the cradle of freedom it is sanatan dharma itself the eternal way that has kept this civilization alive for all these thousands thousands of years.

[00:16:00]I want to make a deeper argument also ladies and gentlemen and it requires us to think more carefully about what India actually is. Most states they were created recently sometimes arbitrarily by treaties, wars, departure of colonial rulers.

[00:16:23]India is not a nation state.

[00:16:26]India is a civilizational state. There is a profound difference in this. For instance, Pakistan is a nation state. It was created in 1947. Bangladesh in 197.

[00:16:40]Most African countries 1960s even France and Germany in their current borders and in their current identities are products of the 19th century.

[00:16:52]India is very different. A nation state is a political construct. Ladies and gentlemen, a civilizational state in many ways is something deeper, something more organic. It is, as some philosophers have called it, a living, breathing organism of culture, philosophy, memory, and indeed, I would also argue spiritual practice that predates politics by thousands of years.

[00:17:22]What is the key to understanding this civilization? Orurubindu answered that question in his great work, The Renaissance in India. Spirituality indeed, he said, is the master key of the Indian mind. The sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the very beginning and even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance. She never never lost hold of this insight that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities. What is Orurubindo saying? He's saying that the great insight of the Indian civilizational state is not territory.

[00:18:10]It's not materialism.

[00:18:12]It's not dynasty. It's not political power. It is spirituality. The unbroken thread of the infinite that has kept this civilization coherent that has kept this civilization alive for thousands of years. And it is from this deep spiritual coherence that India's nationalism draws its character.

[00:18:38]One of the questions I'm often asked is it's all very well to talk about India as a civilizational state. But what created this civilizational state? In what manner and form was it constructed?

[00:18:51]And of course there are philosophers in India who worked on this and spoke about this and of course uh many others in the west including Diana Ek wrote about this in her book.

[00:19:04]India and its civilizational state its civilizational nation was constructed by what could be called the footsteps of pilgrims. If you look at the ctographic imagination of India, how does the Indian map create it? You will see that the lines and the dots that connect spiritual places or pilgrimages north, south, east and west.

[00:19:34]They create the ctographic imagination of India. Which is why it is a civilization which says chari you must keep walking you must keep traveling because all or many of our great saints did the same thing in order to understand India in order to understand bharat the adi shankara traveled north south east and west in order to understand bharat swami viveananda traveled north south east and west it is through the footsteps ladies and gentlemen of the pilgrims of our spiritual places that fundamentally the idea of India the very nature of India the very civilization of India was created. Please remember that this of course was broken as far as China is concerned. China also calls itself a civilizational state. But the great leap forward, the cultural revolution broke their history broke it and they tried to break away and take a great leap forward into a future that would leave its history behind. India maintains an unbroken tradition and that tradition gives its civilization meaning and coherence.

[00:20:54]The Bengali sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkcar often called the father of Indian international relations writing in 1918 challenged the euroentric myth that Asia was static backward um you know places full of static and backward places civilizations awaiting western tutilage. In his landmark essay, the futurism of young Asia, Sirar argued that Euroamerica or Eura as he called it, had been challenging Asia for a century and that what looked like Asian pacivity was in fact the stillness before a great awakening. Asia was not passive. It was merely still and it was going to wake up. He produced detailed scholarship showing that India of course as we all know today had ancient very sophisticated traditions in mathematics, political philosophy, economics and state craft. Traditions that did not borrow from the west but had flourished independently for millennia.

[00:21:59]He was saying in a sense we do not owe you our selfrespect and we do not take our ideas of self-respect from you.

[00:22:12]The great scholar AK Rammenujan once asked in his famous 1989 essay is there an Indian way of thinking? In that essay, Rammanujan plays with the emphasis in that one sentence.

[00:22:30]Is there an Indian way of thinking?

[00:22:34]Is there an Indian way of thinking?

[00:22:38]Is there an Indian way of thinking?

[00:22:42]With each emphasis he shows how profoundly the question itself shifts based on where you place the emphasis and the stress. One of his answers was that the Indian way of thinking is profoundly contextual.

[00:22:59]It does not abstract. It embeds everything in the particular in this river in this mountain in this ancestor in this story told in this village on this night of this festival. That is exactly how Indian nationalism works. It works in the context of India. It works in the lived experience of every Indian and it constantly lives and is alive because it is something living. It is not an idea. It is something Indians live every day.

[00:23:43]Ian Forester in a passage to India described an English woman noticing a wasp asleep on a peg inside her house and observing somewhat puzzled that no Indian animal had no sense of an interior. Bats, rats, birds, insects will as soon nest inside a house as outside. It is to them a normal growth of the external jungle. He meant it as an observation about animals but it perfectly captures something deep about Indian consciousness.

[00:24:19]In the Indian mind there is no hard wall between the inside and the outside. The sacred is in the domestic. The Ganga is both a river and a goddess. The nation is both a territory, landmass and a mother. Bharat Mata, you do not love India from a distance with me flags and anthems though those of course matter very much too. You love India the way you love your own home, your own family, your own mother. That which is outside is inside.

[00:25:01]There is a German idea that talks about a deep interior yearning, a homesickness for a home you have never left. Indian patriotism is that, ladies and gentlemen. It is not conquest. It is not built on the idea of conquest. It is built on the fundamental idea of a home that you never left and a home that you're deeply embedded and it is deeply intertwined in your very being. It is not expansion. It is not conquest. It is belonging. And this is precisely because of this belonging that the mother, the spiritual collaborator of Shiorobindhu could say with such calm certainty, India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind. India will be the land of its resurrection, the resurrection to a higher and truer life.

[00:26:05]She was not speaking as a politician.

[00:26:07]She was speaking as one that understood the civilization that has kept the flame of spiritual knowledge alive for longer than any other on earth has a role to play that no political program can ever hope to replace.

[00:26:28]Finally, I want to conclude by talking about what we stand to lose. How should we look at this differently? Indian nationalism and western nationalism and what we what we should what we might lose if we don't understand this difference in Europe the idea between nationalism and spirituality is seen with a lot of uh trepidition this combination has had a catastrophic history the crusades the inquisition the wars of the reformation the European imag imagination is blood soaked with nationalism plus religion which equals persecution.

[00:27:10]But India's civilizational nationalism is not evangelical. It does not seek to convert the world. The Indian civilizational impulse is not that you must become like us. It is we are like this and we are at home here. Swami Viveandanda stood at the parliament of the world's religions in Chicago in 1893 and said I am proud to belong to a religion which taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. He did not say you must convert and become like us. He said the oldest civilization on earth has something to offer to the world. The knowledge that truth is one even though it may be called by many names. Orurubindu took this further. He did not merely celebrate India's past.

[00:28:01]He claimed a mission for her future. In what is perhaps his most visionary statement, he wrote, "India of the ages is not dead.

[00:28:10]Nor has she spoken her last creative word. She lives and has still something to do for herself and the all the human peoples." This is a profoundly different civilizational posture from the one that built empires. It is a nationalism rooted not in superiority but in self-nowledge, not in aggression but in abundance.

[00:28:35]Indian nationalism is a powerful idea.

[00:28:39]It is a powerful idea not because India seeks to conquer with that idea but because Indian nationalism is something that keeps us alive in our home the only home most of us will ever know because it is our integral idea of being because it is an idea that is profoundly universalist in nature and it's an idea that India has propagated in a spiritual sense. for thousands of years and it keeps it alive even today.

[00:29:16]In conclusion, if we throw away Indian nationalism, what is it that we are throwing away? Indian civilization survived thousands of years of invasion.

[00:29:29]It survived conquest, destructions of temples and universities. It survived the systematic looting drains of billions of dollars of wealth. It survived partition. It survived the who died during partition through all of this through all this fire and sword and famine and humiliation. What has kept Indian civilization alive? What has kept the lambs as it were of the pavali burning in the darkest years? What has kept the music of our entirely sublime musical tradition alive in various parts of our own country?

[00:30:09]It is this love for this land, the pride and this culture and it is this patriotism, this nationalism. Let me return first time to Samuel Johnson where we began.

[00:30:22]James Boswell, who recorded Johnson's famous remark, was careful to add a caveat that most people forget. Johnson was talking about fake patriots. He was not talking about real nationalists, real patriots. Even Johnson, the Englishman who never felt the boot of colonialism on his neck, understood that there was such a thing as genuine love of country. India's freedom fighters were the real ones. Kodi Ram Bose, Prul Lachaki, Sadar Patel, Bhagat Singh, Net Gi, Tilak, Orurubindo, Gandhi, Neu, you can keep naming people or one after the other in a long chain of people of patriots of nationalists who truly loved this civilization. And we are free today, ladies and gentlemen. Free today because these men and women were not afraid to love this country. We are here today as citizens of an independent sovereign democratic republic because they had the courage to call themselves patriots and nationalists. There is no reason therefore there is no reason why we should be ashamed of it. There there should be no reason why we should discourage or in any way shake off the nationalist tag. Casey Bhachara told us what it means to shake free of cultural subjugation. It is, he said, like scales falling off one's eyes. A rebirth. That is what reclaiming our right to nationalism is. It is a rebirth.

[00:31:57]Orurubindo told us what this rebirth is for. This rebirth is to give the world a new idea of global consciousness, a new idea of going beyond the petty divisions that divide us today. And that's why ladies and gentlemen from republic's nationalist conclave and this stage I am proud to say I am a nationalist. I was a nationalist and I forever will be an Indian nationalist.

[00:32:32]Indian nationalism lives with me in my heart exactly like the memory of my mother lives in my heart. Thank you ladies and gentlemen.