Name: Anashya Ghoshal

Roll No.: HIST17

Year: PG-1
Department of History,
Presidency University
Internal Assignment for Paper 704, set by course
instructor: Dr. Swarupa Gupta
Assignment Topic: Analyse the relationship
between culture and nationalism in transnational
contexts by focusing on the interface between
'Western' and South Asian ideas of history.

Preface: Culture and History

There are certain things that are blithely regarded as having been resolved; just how
fraught with intellectual irresolution the definitions, the boundaries, indeed, the existence
of these things are are not given due thought. History ranks among these. Hail the nearest
plebeian in the nearest forum, and ask him what the word history is. He will doubtless
repeat that platitude: history is the study of the past (which is, surprisingly, -- but this is
a point to which we will return -- in concordance with the dictionary definition of the
word).1 Or, if he accounts himself wise, he will say: the study of the past so that we do
not repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. The historian posing these questions will
immediately look askance at the plebeian, and ask him: What study? Which past? What
mistakes? Let the plebeian shrug and shuffle away; he doubtless has more immediately
productive business to attend to.
So, what is history? We can rest quite assured that no definition is adequate: each leaves
something out, and some outright contradict the others. Here are a few examples:
History is a narration of the events which have happened among
mankind, including an account of the rise and fall of nations, as well as
of other great changes which have affected the political and social
condition of the human race. [] In a more restricted sense, it is a
record of the progress of mankind in civilisation; and hence, deals
primarily with those nations which, by their courage, energy, and
mental power, have performed great achievements in acquiring
dominion, and have made considerable advancement in intelligence and
culture. -- John J. Anderson2
History is and should be a science. [...] History is not the accumulation
of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of
human societies. -- Fustel de Coulanges3
HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly
fools. -- Ambrose Bierce4
History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the
contrary, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. There is the
history of human opinions, which is scarcely anything more than the
history of human errors. -- Franois Marie Arouet alias Voltaire5

And so on.
History seems to be, therefore, terribly difficult to define. What ought we to do, then? If
definitions are inadequate, then perhaps we should seek to describe it as best as we can.6
1 Matching with one of the definitions, anyway. See the Merriam Webster Online entry:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/history. Meaning 3.
2 John J. Anderson, A Manual of General History, London: Clark and Maynard, 1876: p. 3.
3 Quoted in Marc Bloch, Peter Putnam (tr.), The Historians Craft, USA: Vintage Books, 1953: p. 25.
4 Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary, New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1911 (originally published
1906).
5 Franois Marie Arouet, William F. Fleming (tr.), Philosophical Dictionary (originally published as
Dictionnaire philosophique), New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901 (originally published 1764): entry number
259.

For the purposes of this essay, a description that is as good as any other is: History is the
memory of mankind, remembered, whether or not wholly. Memory, any kind of
memory, is gigantic, just as the past is gigantic (not a fitting word; but I use gigantic in
the sense of voluminous). (For the past is getting more and more voluminous with every
second that passes.)
Does history consist of facts? Yes, of course: in October 1347 Anno Domini, the
bacterium Yersinia pestis reached Sicily in the holds of twelve Genoese galleys,
unleashing upon Europe the Black Death. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. The Aztec
emperor Moctezuma was held captive in his own capital by the conquistador Hernn
Corts. But facts have four limitations: one, they are not directly available to us; two,
given the human tendency for instant association with other facts and contexts, facts by
themselves do not provide much meaning; three: these words depend on their purposes;
and four: the very idea of fact as we know it now is relatively recent. Etymologically,
fact comes from the Latin facere and factum, meaning to do.7
My point behind this is simply that as a cultural 8 phenomenon, the writing and
remembering of history is uniquely important to human beings, even more than such
accidental properties as music or painting or dance. For while music and painting and
dance are essentially creative forms of self-expression, history is absolutely essential to
the selfs knowledge of the self. For as incarnate creatures in time (and subject to its
linear flow), the past is indeed all that we know, and history, which is the result of
remembered things put through the lens of human understanding, is the human past as
understood and remembered by humans, forming a central part of a peoples selfunderstanding and self-knowledge, and all the political implications thereof.
It is not therefore too much a stretch of the imagination to posit that as a cultural or
epistemological weapon, history is very potent, especially when woven with that other
question so central to a people: freedom in both the causal and the teleological sense.
What this paper will seek to do is see how in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and the
early twentieth century in a transnational context in this case, colonial and imperial,
which are but subsets of transnational contact the colonial intelligentsia in Bengal wove
together the ideas of culture and nationalism through a re-engagement with and reunderstanding of notions of history as it applied to them. The conceptual tools will be the
usages of samaj and dharma. We will also see how in this endeavour they were (were
6 This is a rather important point, and absolutely central to human experience. Let the harshest
lexicographer try to define the things that we have gone to war over, -- God, Love, Beauty, Truth,
Perfection -- and he will see just how difficult they are to pin down. If we were to ask the Mahdi -- the
whirling Dervishes -- why they fought at Omdurman as they did, they would no doubt say that their
beliefs regarding God were true. Which would explain absolutely nothing: as far as causality is concerned,
their answer would only be trivially true. Same with, say, the concept of straight. A child of six may not
know the geometrical definition of straight -- the shortest possible line between two points -- but she
knows what straight is. Definition is important, surely, in the natural sciences, where measurement is
necessary; but in a field of learning where the goal is understanding, perhaps the requirement for definition
(and accuracy, as well; but certainly not at its expense) is not as burning as in, for example, the science of
chemistry.
7 See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fact. Last accessed: 21/10/2015.
8 If intellection is a cultural phenomena, then should it not be obvious to say that history too is cultural
indeed, of the greatest cultural importance?

being, and would be) paralleled by intellectuals in similar transnational situations and
discourses of power.
Introduction: The Kinds of National Imagination
It cannot be disproved that modern nation-states (with the concepts attendant to them,
such as a large bureaucracy, secularism, republicanism, non-porous borders, a standing
military,9 and a social policy that, ideally, does not discriminate, but that assigns benefits,
honours, etc., according to the social and economic performance of individuals, and,
indeed, is designed to extract such performance) 10 are, in the West, at least, precisely that:
modern.11 But what gives rise to modern nation-states? Nationalism? Very likely; if the
nation does not condense out of blind historical processes but is a creation of human
beings, then it must be the case that there is indeed an engagement of human intellect
(and its products) with the possibility of the creation of the nation.
Does this mean that there is only one kind of nation possible, the modern nation state? Of
course not: the previous violent, sanguinary century with its totalizing ideologies of antiSemitic Nazism, Maoism, and Soviet Communism showed the immense pull the
ideologies of the very obverse of the modern nation states could exert on people.
The very primary assumption that this paper hinges on is that it is natural for human
beings to organise themselves into groups, to ascribe characteristics (and sometimes
personalities, such as, say, Bharat Mata) to these groups, and to, to a certain degree,
identify themselves with this group (this may or may not involve a ritual surrendering of a
part of ones volition and free will). This assumption has been formulated in a number of
ways: Aristotle (and other proponents of political naturalism) would call this impulse (if
that is what it is) as growing out of mans biology: even as the species cannot be
propagated without the union of the male and the female, so also can the best for the
species not be attained except through the growth of what he calls the state, for the whole
is superior to the part (even though the parts are prior ontologically to the whole), and the
9 A military that is composed of men and women who have soldiering as their profession; the modern
nation-state usually does not in peace-time have a system of conscription in place there are some notable
exceptions to this, such as Israel and citizens are not required to be soldiers. Again, such countries as
Israel or North Korea arent completely modern in their national ideologies: Zionism and Juche are both
quasi-religious and ethnic formulations, and arent theoretically conducive to a modern, liberal democracy.
Still, in the case of Israel, for the most part, practical economic and political considerations dictate national
(and social) policy.
10 The genealogy of such a system is not difficult to trace. In the case of the Anglosphere, J. G. A. Pocock
says that the metaphysical assumptions necessary to establish such a system were derived from a
combination of Renaissance anthropology, Machiavellian ideas of corruption and sin, and a rather Pelagian
method of combating such sin. Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975: pp. 506-512.
11 If only for the absence of the characteristics mentioned in parentheses. Therefore, while Imperial China
did have a very strong Weberian bureaucracy, the racial assumptions of Chinese society are difficult to
ignore. This is what the historian of China Frank Diktter says: A common historical response to serious
threats directed towards a symbolic universe is 'nihilation', or the conceptual liquidation of everything
inconsistent with official doctrine. Foreigners were labelled 'barbarians' or 'devils' to be conceptually
eliminated. The official rhetoric reduced the Westerner to a devil, a ghost, an evil and unreal goblin
hovering on the border of humanity. Many texts of the first half of the nineteenth century referred to the
English as 'foreign devils' (yangguizi), 'devil slaves' (guinu), 'barbarian devils' (fangui), 'island barbarians'
(daoyi), 'blue-eyed barbarian slaves' (biyan yinu), or 'red-haired barbarians' (hongmaofan). See Frank
Diktter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992: p. 36.

individual is not self-sufficing;12 others, such as Thomas Hobbes and the Enlightenment
contractualists after him, have rejected the telos of the state, calling it but a utilitarian
agreement to which human beings are, through deficiencies in their nature, signatories; 13
still others and this is the formulation that will concern this essay most have
understood the nation (and national culture) as being at once rarefied and immanent, with
the immanence and the rarity flowing into each other.
The Program
If history is what we understood it to be, it was therefore perhaps inevitable that in the
light of the infliction of what can only be called epistemic violence by colonial
historians,14 the indigenous literati in Bengal and elsewhere could reply only with
intellectual interventions of their own. Chief among the tasks would be to, first, establish
a notion of cultural commonality, a fire in which unities, imagined or otherwise, 15 could
be forged, and then retrieve a history of this commonality, this unity, and through it,
present an alternate view of the peoples that, instead of denigrating, would lift up the
people, imbuing them with a sense of history, of their past that, even though it may be
factually incorrect, would nonetheless be a supremely effective cultural-nationalist tool.
That which Binds: Samaj and Dharma
As in the case of what can broadly be called romanticism in nationalism in Germany (and
in other parts of the world), 16 the process was a methodological exercise, involving the
recasting of the ideas of history then prevalent about the nation or whatever its present
political position. By recasting, what the author means is that the idea of history, of what
history is, essentially, and what the history of a particular nation is is recast: these
attempts deal more with establishing a narrative than with providing a mode of studying
history.17 This is supremely important, for if history is more than a simple recollection of
facts, if history is in fact central to human understanding of itself, then it cannot but
engage with what ails the people at the moment.
12 This idea is tied utterly to Aristotles the Final Cause of Aristotles Four Causes: if a thing's proper end
is that which is perfective of it, then the state, which perfects human nature, is humanitys proper end; cf.
Aristotle, Benjamin Jowett (tr.), Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885: Book One, Sections I and II.
13 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical
and Civill, St Pauls Churchyard: Green Dragon, 1651: chs. XIII, XIV, XVI, and XVII.
14 A rather useful term, as it helps bring into focus the allied cultural-intellectual project of colonial
historiography. I refer here mainly to the charge that India was a history-less culture. For example, see:
H. H. Wilson, An Introduction to Universal History, for the Use of Schools, Calcutta: Calcutta School Book
Society, 1854: p. 123. For a theoretic appraisal of the wider problems of presentation of the other and the
self in social sciences, cf. Santiago Castro-Gomez and Desiree A. Martin, "The Social Sciences, Epistemic
Violence, and the Problem of the "Invention of the Other"", Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 3, no. 2
(2002): pp. 269-28.
15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 2006 revised edition used (originally
published 1983).
16 On Romantic nationalism in Germany, see William Wilson, Herder, Folklore and Romantic
Nationalism, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 1973: pp. 819-835.
17 Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 1990:
pp. 329-361.

As such, no attempt to illumine links between notions of nationhood in late colonial

Bengal (and India as a whole) can be complete without drawing upon the concept of
samaj. It was etymologically multi-faceted, meaning variously an aggregate, a
collectivity of individuals, the peoples of a particular region, and thus allowed itself to be
manipulated into accommodating a great number of ideas, all linked together by a
reference to a living history18 of collectivity and to commonality.
The idea of samaj is grounded in two root concepts: one is, of course, the immediate and
the familial. Take the Bengali expression atmiya-sajan. It means, literally, ones own
people, and therefore implies a relationship that is not restricted to blood relations; like
the similar English word kindred, it implies the formation of an almost sacral
relationship between two or more people based on similarities, be they allied beliefs,
similar interests, membership in the same place of worship, and so on. Again, like
kindred, it implies the idea of a family that expands ever outwards, incorporating
members that are not related in any substantial way to the original members except
through the profession of a similar belief. Secondly, and more importantly, of course,
samaj serves a regulatory role: it regulates the individual by creating for him a normative
universe. And how was it to do that? If we see such texts of the period as Rajnarain
Basus Se Kal ar E Kal (1876) or even the late 1917 text Banger Ratnamala by
Kalikrishna Bhattacharya, we will see exhortations to duty, to empathy, selftranscendence, and so on, and to such qualities as would help the young (the bendable, at
any rate; some youngsters are notoriously unamenable to moral instruction) to cultivate
cultural Aryanness.19
Aryanness was a comfortable cultural label within which the literati could place itself; it
was a mode of life that regulated behaviour, moulded the growing individual, and, as an
idiom of duty and self-development, laid out the qualities which society expected of the
individuals. This was especially comfortable because in its flexibility, it, and its allied
expression, Dharma, was free of religious loyalties.20
Dharma as a way of life was central to the samajik reinterpretation of socio-political life:
this was because of the implicit idea of unity in samaj and Dharma; what I mean is that if
the assertion is that Dharma is a non-incarnate distillation of the best in man, an
immanently existent expression of his way of life, and not merely law (which is, in the
strictest Beccarian liberal or Biblical term, a voluntary agreement between man and the
One on Up High or Society or whatever to follow a set of rules designed to merely help
him and others, not an expression of the highest that he is capable of achieving; what I
mean is that the commandment Thou shalt not kill is not Justice; it merely lays down
18 What the author here means is a living tradition that continues to exist. For a similar idea that involves
play-acting and reenactment, see R. Handler and W. Saxton, "Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and
the Quest for Authenticity in Living History,"" Cultural Anthropology, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1988: pp. 242
260.
19 The origin of the Bengali race was a source of constant concern to these intellectuals. Cf.
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bankim Rachanabali, Vol. II, Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1955: pp. 338;
363.
20 Papia Chakravarti, Hindu Response to Nationalist Ferment, Bengal, 1909-1935, Calcutta:
Subarnarekha, 1992: pp. 115; 375.

the path by which Justice can be reached, and it is dependent on the voluntary
cooperation of man with it), then monism (however small the degree) is impossible to
avoid. The flexibility mentioned before, therefore, was but an expression of this monism:
and by it, the samaj was able to incorporate other civilisational qualities, assimilating
them into it but yet retaining its distinctive nature.
Through such interventions, therefore, the literati could shape quite successfully an image
of cultural/philosophical unity (ekata/aikya), which, if we recall the last line of the
second section of this essay, was, unlike political unity, difficult to pin down (testament to
its rarefied nature) but at the same time present either potentially or actually in the lived
lives of the people and their samaj.
History and Nationalism
While the Bengali literati did previously re-imagine their national history in empowering
terms, they were still subject to the same epistemic tools that the Orientalist scholars had
brought.21 However, an alternate attempt was made to create a program for nationalism
cultural nationalism, especially through the emplacing of the concepts of samaj and
dharma into a new frame of history.
But what was this new national history? It could not simply be a history of the
Bengali-speaking peoples like the magnum opus of Niharranjan Ray.22 For one, such a
largely empirical, scientific history was difficult to write in the absence of reliable
empirical data. But most importantly, could such a work 1. capture the unique cultural
energy, Kraft,23 that set the Bengali apart from the other samajs? 2. be potent enough as a
political-epistemic weapon, for wouldnt such an empirical history be the very same thing
that this new historiographical attempt was trying to reject? So, what could be the
answer? The answer was delivered in terms of cohesion through culture and attachment
to social collectivity. The crucial shift was from political history to cultural history and
histories of community (samaj),24 reimagining the trajectory of the people and the nation
through non-political and samajik Weltanschauungen.
This was crucial in the growth of cultural nationalism. If kultur involves energy more
than cold,25 analytical reason, then possibly an historical narrative that explained away
21 See Partha Chatterjee on Bankimchandra: Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Books, 1993 (first published 1986): pp. 54-58; see ch. 3 in
general.
22 Niharranjan Ray, John W. Hood (tr.), History of the Bengali People: From Earliest Times to the Fall of
the Sena Dynasty, Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013 edition (first published 1994). See for the racial origins
of the Bengalis, pp. 15-49.
23 R. T. Clark, "Herder's Conception of "Kraft"", PMLA, Vol. 57, No. 3, 1942: pp. 737752.
24 Remarkable because such a trend would take more than half a century to return to professional
academic writing in India; the intervening years would produce scholars of India who worked on the
scientific, empirical model (with an obvious Whiggish or Marxist telos), such as Bipan Chandra, Aditya
Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, R. C. Dutt, and so on.
25 Regard the assumption in this typical counter-Enlightenment epithet as applied to reason quite a far
cry from my own beliefs regarding reason, which are similar to those held by St Thomas Aquinas.

political defeats and crises as being ultimately irrelevant was needed; this was provided
by the assertion that the ente et essentia (being and essence) of a people were not to be
found in the state (and institutions thereof) that the people inhabited but rather in their
samajik expression: this assertion led to a redefinition of the link between the people
(jati) and the land (desh) through an assertion of the importance of culture and the
subsequent closing off of historical understanding to outsiders. 26 But of course this did
not mean xenophobia. Nationalism cannot in its formative phase afford to be xenophobic:
thus samaj in deliberately broadening its understanding of the essentials of what makes a
culture could be a handy tool in positing a truly trans-regional unity. I refer to the Swami
Vivekananda who saw samajik unity as being based upon the very root of the monistic
Hindu philosophical tradition, Vedanta.27
Therefore, we have seen how the intelligentsia of the period and the place mentioned
tried to, with the conceptual tool of samaj, negotiate the politically fragmented and/or
subjugated nation that they dwelt in, positing a cultural nationalism (which was not, as
the example of Bankimchandra shows, monolithic, but as varied as the people
themselves: it is, we hope, a given that intellection is individual) through a representation
of the history of that nation that would empower and brace the tired and the exhausted
populace.
In Conclusion, or What Came of It
Let us state right now that this program to write an alternate notion of history as separate
from the Western idea of history as it applied to India (it had several manifestations, one
of the most famous being Gandhijis interpretation, as outlined in his 1909 pamphlet
Hind Swaraj) did not succeed in determining to any great degree Indias political future
at least, Indias mainstream political future.28 Instead, what succeeded in doing so was the
cosmopolitan, secular, contractual-statist, and a-cultural minimalistic interpretation of the
Indian National Congress, whose intellectual root was not Herder or Fichte or any of
those who would say that the political duty of a nation lay in the direction of kulturkampf,
but rather Victorian liberalism, with strong inputs from the utilitarian practicality of John
Stuart Mill, the rationality of August Comte, and the secularism of David Hume, which
desired to put political power at the feet of civil society, which through consent and
elections would allow the people who were asked to not abandon their personal feelings
and opinions, nor to lead their lives according to a dharma, but to, rather simply, cast
their votes at election time and hold to two things: that all people have rights, and that
individual consent (expressed through universal adult franchise) is the only way to
govern. The kind of history that the INC rhetoric produced can be seen very clearly in the
works of such nationalist historians as Bipan Chandra and R. C. Majumdar (as well as
those of Mohammed and Irfan Habib who are not widely regarded as being nationalist),
26 Durgachand Sanyal, Banglar Samajik Itihas, Calcutta, 1910: Introduction.
27 Swami Vivekananda, Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Kolkata: Advaita
Ashrama, 2011 edition (first published 1944): pp. 97-98; 188-193; 210-214; 226-227; 232; 236-239; 278279.
28 Regard the bogey of the Hindu Right in contemporary discourse, a bogey that has been remarked on a
great variety of intellectuals and opinion outlets, ranging from the renowned scholar of Islam Richard
Eaton to Indian Express pieces.

for whom the existence of the state as the expression of the will of the people was
paramount.29
In Bengal, the earlier cultural nationalism was gradually eschewed for a nationalism
based on civil society, but moderated mainly through the efforts of Rabindranath
Tagore30 and C. R. Das31 by a language of duty and a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that
often took on moral overtones.32 We must, to understand why this failed, look to Isaiah
Berlin, and see in which conditions especially cultural nationalism arises. Berlin draws a
compelling picture in which he says that cultural nationalism (and its philosophical root,
romanticism, with its pietism, its rejection of the possibility of universal understanding
and of a shared human culture) is likelier to develop in a country that is down-trodden, is
occupied, and that, in spite of having individual intellects, is unable, for some reason or
the other, to find praise or recognition on the world stage. 33 While we wont go so far as
to say that romanticism was a very grand form of sour grapes,34 the parallels that can be
drawn between seventeenth and eighteenth century Germany (and possibly inter-bellum
Germany) and India (another transnational connection) present a very, very persuasive
model of understanding the relationship between culture and nationalism and the
understandings of history that are woven throughout. (Note that it is most persuasive only
when we posit a common human nature which, as a Thomist, I do; but many do not
for them, alternate models must be sought.)
P.S.: The development of Gesellschaft and civil society may be decried by Ferdinand
Tnnies, and rejected outright by Mohandas Gandhi,35 but even the bland charade of
29 See, for example, Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010 reprint
(first published 2009): pp. 1-52.
30 See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908, Delhi: Peoples Publishing House,
1973: pp. 54-55.
31 Discussed in Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875-1927, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1984: pp. 211-212.
32 Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanavali, Calcutta: West Bengal Government, 1990: p. 53.
33 Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (ed.), The Roots of Romanticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999 (first published 1965): pp. 34-40.
34 Ibid.: p. 37.
35 It may be interesting to note that for Gandhi, the impetus to write Hind Swaraj came from, of all people,
Gilbert Keith Chesterton. In an article for the Illustrated London News, Chesterton wrote: When I am
confronted with the actual papers and statements of the Indian Nationalists I feel much more dubious, and,
to tell the truth, a little bored. The principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very
Indian and not very national. [] When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking
for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else.
There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people
demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: "I heartily wish India had always been
free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. [] Perhaps
you think I am opposing Indian Nationalism. That is just where you make a mistake; I am letting my mind
play round the subject. This is especially desirable when we are dealing with the deep conflict between two
complete civilisations. Nor do I deny the existence of natural rights. The right of a people to express itself,
to be itself in arts and action, seems to me a genuine right. If there is such a thing as India, it has a right to
be Indian. But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; "Sociology" is not Indian; all this pedantic clatter about
culture and science is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is our first abstract
difficulty, that we cannot feel certain that the Indian Nationalist is national. Cf. G. K. Chesterton,

elections and bureaucratic inertia is preferable at least in itself; it is not a perfect

solution, of course to tens of thousands of dharma-infused men marching to the strains
of Horst Wessel.

Illustrated London News, September 18, 1909. Gandhi immediately translated the article into Gujarati, and
put in Chestertons advice in formulating a new idea of peculiarly Indian history. This episode in
discussed in some detail in Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi, New York: Stein and Day, 1968: pp. 137-138, and also
in Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire, Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007: pp. 141-142.