Like Tagore, with whom he had a long and mutually enriching friendship, Gandhi in 1909 was engaged in a polemical battle with his radical and revolutionary peers who saw salvation in the wholesale imitation of Western-style state and society. Many of these were Hindu nationalists, the ideological children of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and later part of a religious-cultural movement that derived inspiration from the Fascist parties of Italy and Germany, and which aimed to unite India through a monolithic Hindu nationalism derived from the joint British-Indian reinvention of Hinduism in the nineteenth century. Gandhi saw that these nationalists would merely replace one set of deluded rulers in India with another: English rule, he wrote in Hind Swaraj, without the Englishman. --------Pankaj Mishra (From the Ruins of Empire)
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 02:55:47 +0000
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