[Reader-list] The Growing National Ethos In The Mirror Of Allahabad

[himanshu ranjan]

The Growing National Ethos in the Mirror of Allahabad (Posting 3)
 
     Since ancient times and throughout the medieval period Allahabad has been a religious centre of high esteem. The so-called renaissance made a drastic change in its character in two ways. Revivalism and colonialism were the main dimentions making substantial space and seeking far-fetched repercussions. At this juncture, from the very duo-web, there emerged a new vivid and multifaceted socio-political and cultural phenomenon which reshaped and transformed this centre into a cultural one. This turning point is identified with the advent of the nationalist movement.
     The concepts of 'nation', 'nationality' and 'nationalism' in the modern European sense of the terms were not familiar to the land before. Making India a modern nation-state meant initially and intrinsically to get into the process of democratization. The Sanskrit classic textuality, manifested by renaissance revivalism, advocated the notion of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam', but hardly that of a territorial nation-state. The concept of nation required mainly three constituents: a well demarcated territory, a strong state with a commanding government and a national language. All the three were not readymade ones, but to be acquired and developed democratically through the nationalist movement. Colonial India, which inflicted the process of modernization to seek its own endgames, was not ready to provide or allow the required economic growth and transformation. In this complex situation, the nationalist movement had also to construct and carry on the plank of decolonization placing it
 prominently side by side in its fold. It became so important that the whole vision was simplistically reduced into just throwing out the imperialist regime.
     But the questions and problems regarding nationhood, nation-state and national language remained unanswered. Allahabad witnessed the struggle, passed and failed to some extents both, which manifested itself in the politics of the Indian National Congress, the Swaraj Bhawan being its head office. The Congress party and the cultural centre of Allahabad obviously provided an open-ended platform for the contending political idealogies, which no doubt checked the unilateral and centralised drive. But the cleavage left in the national ethos, made a way for the communal power-play of the Hindu-Muslim strife, which had already originated in the nineteenth century. Now it was not only a tug-of-war between the Hindu and the Muslim communalists, but a triangle was formed, the secular-democratic forces placing themselves on the third vertex. The question of national language reflected the whole phenomenon in the most pointed and concentrated way. Hindu-Hindi, Muslim-Urdu and Hindustani as a
 compromise between the two, formed another trio.
     Similarly the independence and the partition of the country were the duo-resultants, which created one more significant dimension to the problem. Hindi has been declared the official language, but the old nationalist propagators are still today standing on their heels to get a sole national language status, and are not least interested in resolving the problem in a democratic and true nationalist way.
     The cultural institutions of Allahabad and the linguistic and literary discourses, debates and movements of HIndi and Urdu, before and after independence, have been constituting a changing mirror for the whole process. The decisive constitutional authority has shifted to Delhi but the very process of germinating and growing of national ethos, still remains as a hard historic fact in the memory of Allahabad.
 
                                                                        Himanshu Ranjan
                                                                  An independent CSDS Fellow



Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partneronline.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050324/302278a6/attachment.html