Any sense of the past is deeply political. In the contemporary historical juncture, one witnesses a concerted effort to rewrite the history of India and reimagine the past. This effort is both initiated and supported by the state in a clime where scant regard is given to serious scholarship and professional historians. Emotive hyperbole governs public discourse.  And the rich writings of modern Indian scholars, activists and artists are forgotten.  It is in such a backdrop Ananya Vajpeyi’s book Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, published by Harvard University Press in 2012, as a text comes to say to the world, out and loud the grounded norms and values that once shaped the republic India, and which has stood the test of times.

The overarching philosophy that the author uses rests mostly in the idea of Swaraj (Self-rule) and a modernized version of it can be termed ‘political independence’. “Reflect on the crisis of the self as a crisis in the tradition which has formed the self” (MacIntyre, 2006). This supposition made by MacIntyre manifests through the text and the author has adopted such an epistemology with an utmost eye for detail, choosing five individuals whose ideas of ‘the self’ always stood by the lives and voices of ‘the other’. A looking back into such a tradition wherein the idea of ‘the self’ was translated to be a life lived by and for ‘the other’ is more important than ever before when the idea of grandiose power seems to have invisibilized the idea of reason and the spirit of compassion. The book has five chapters that focus on five figures, long gone but who continue to illuminate the republic of India.

The first chapter is on Mohandas Gandhi emphasising the ideal that Gandhi carried with him throughout his life which is Ahimsa. Gandhi understood Ahimsa precisely to be a relationship between the self and the other. The author critically analyses ahimsa in multiple contexts informed by readings of the Mahabharatha, Gita, and Jainism among others. The author also puts certain symbolic representations which Gandhi carried along with him to critical scrutiny.

The second chapter is on Rabindranath Tagore and it is Viraha that the author sees as reflecting the idea of Self’s longing. Viraha can be related to a state of separation. Ranajit Guha once remarked that for Tagore history was personal rather than public and it unfolded idiosyncratically in the mind rather than chronologically in the world (Guha, 2002). Perhaps such a manifestation can be seen evident even in his famous song Ekla Chalo Re which was beloved by Gandhi. For Tagore viraha was a highly suppressed and contained truth and it resonated throughout, both in his life as well as in his poetry. Perhaps as much as poetry was his life, his life was equally that of poetry too, this seems to be primarily because of a blanket covered with Viraha. The haunting refrain of Ekla Chalo Re is: “If no one heeds your call/ O luckless One/ Walk alone! Walk alone!” Vajpeyi reads it as an aporia: a silence in the stream of language, a gap in memory, a break in the imagination (Vajpeyi, 2012).

The third chapter is devoted to Abanindranath Tagore and the author underscores it as Samvega, the Self’s Shock. Samvega translates into a sense of shock and the author finds Abanindranath, the father of modern Indian art, and a major cultural nationalist as someone who from the 1890s onwards was in the throes of a deep aesthetic shock moved by prescience, intimation and eventually certain knowledge of the svatva (selfness) of Indic art. Perhaps this chapter also comes as one of the widely researched at the same time less looked into as a figure of a Righteous Republic.

The fourth chapter carries Dharma, the Self’s Aspiration, and Artha, the Self’s Purpose. This chapter is on the doyen of the discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Vajpeyi unfolds Nehrus search for self and writes that two categories of selfhood structured Nehru and it was dharma (norm) and artha (purpose). Through evaluating Nehru’s writings she finds a gradual transition. If earlier texts of Nehru emphasized Dharma, in the later texts the author feels surrounded by a tense equipoise between dharma and artha, finally with the burden of signification laying its rest on artha. The author finds Nehru torn between the normative and instrumental aspects of selfhood.

The fifth chapter talks of Duhkha, the self’s burden and Bhimrao Ambedkar is brought into the picture. She argues in this chapter that the key category that accounts for Ambedkar’s close reading of the early texts of Buddhism including the Dhammapada in Pali is Duhkha or suffering. The author delves into the life of Ambedkar carefully and she finds that the thread that keeps Ambedkar tied to India, even as he wanted to smash India into smithereens and reconstruct them from the ground up, is his abiding commitment to solving the mystery of Duhkha, the suffering of the people (Vajpeyi, 2021).

An all-encompassing lesson in all these five chapters, of the five selves, striving to lay the political foundation for modern India is the vision to build a better world. Irrespective of the current departure from this Righteous Republic, the author has brought alive their vision.

The book has an illuminating introduction that talks about Swaraj, the self’s sovereignty and concludes on a note that talks about the Sovereign Self, its sources and shapes. The appendixes and final notes are as interesting as the chapters themselves. No reader can afford to skip it at any cost.

For Walter Benjamin, the concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. He says in the final analysis, that the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of history rather than of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history (Benjamin, 1978). Ananya Vajpeyi has just unfolded the same through the delving of five lives that shaped the political foundation of modern India.

References:

Benjamin, W., & Arendt, H. (1978). Illuminations: Edited and with an Introd. by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books.

Guha, R. (2002). History at the Limit of World-History. Columbia University Press.

MacIntyre, A. (2006). The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays.Volume 1. Cambridge University Press.

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Sankar Varma is a Research Scholar with the Department of Economics, Chris (Deemed to be University). He is currently researching on urban spaces in India with a special reference to the city of Ernakulam, Kerala. He is an awardee of the Kerala Council for Historical Research PhD Fellowship. His writings look largely into urban issues and othering from a critique of capitalism.