by Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav
My book, Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood, is an intellectual history examining Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought over four different intellectual phases of his active political life, lived from the 1880s to 1928. In doing so, it questions the teleological linkage of Lajpat Rai’s early Hindu nationalist thought (1880s-1915) to Savarkar’s Hindutva nationalism, and highlights internal differentiation within ‘Hindu nationalism’. I argue that Savarkarite Hindutva demanded religious abandonment and cultural assimilation from India’s religious minorities, and treated India’s Muslims and Christians as second-class citizens unless they adopted Hindu culture, which Savarkar regarded as India’s national cultural essence. In contrast, Lajpat Rai’s Hindu nationalism considered Hindu culture as the core of his imagined Hindu nation, which excluded Indian Muslims, but which was imagined as existing alongside a robust Muslim nation. Hindus and Muslims were imagined as separate cultural nations, which could politically cooperate within a common state. Hindu culture was not imagined as India’s national essence nor were India’s Muslims and Christians expected to desert their religions and assimilate into Hindu culture in order to become part of India’s nationhood. In short, unlike Savarkar’s Hindutva, Rai’s was a non-assimilationist, diversity-accepting Hindu nationalism.
My research shows that by 1915, with the start of the third phase of Rai’s political-intellectual life, Lajpat Rai moved towards ‘Indian’ nationalist narratives, it challenges the assumption that all ideas of Hindu nationhood necessarily culminate in Hindutva. Rai’s new ‘Indian’ nationalism entailed new and inclusive ways of constructing a common national identity for India’s Hindus and Muslims. Hindus and Muslims were now seen as descendants of a common Aryan-Mongolian mixed race, and as equally contributing to India’s pluralist nationalist culture. Rai now also constructed for them a shared history, marked not by mutual antagonism, domination and violence, but relative peace and tolerance. Repudiating a conventional Hindu nationalist trope, Rai’s re-interpretation of India’s medieval history involved elaborate manoeuvres emphasising the indigenous nature of ‘Muslim’ rule in India.
Finally, the book examines Lajpat Rai’s nationalist narrative as a Hindu Mahasabha leader in the mid-1920s. It reveals that in this fourth and final phase of his life, Rai simultaneously articulated both a militant Hindu politics and a vision of secular Indian nation-state. Lajpat Rai’s vision of a secular Indian state played its role in containing the expansion of Muslim political rights; Rai organised a Hindu politics to oppose Muslim demands for separate electorates and weightages (weighted representation for Muslims in excess of their demographic proportion). His secularism was also attached to the notion of a Hindu majority. At the same time, Rai opposed ideas of a Hindu theocracy or a state with Hinduism as the official, privileged religion. His vision of a secular state emphasised inclusive and equal citizenship, regardless of religion. It granted religious freedom to all communities as a constitutional right. Interestingly, it was also willing to concede Muslim reservations as a mechanism to check Hindu majoritarian domination and explicitly opposed fantasies of Hindu Raj as ruinous of Hinduism and India. Rai’s secularism further envisioned a federal state that granted substantial cultural autonomy to India’s Muslim majority provinces and contemplated Hindustani as India’s national language. My research shines light on a particular vision of constitutional secularism – one rejecting theocracy and establishment, and enshrining equal citizenship, religious liberty, proportionate Muslim representation, and federal autonomy – as articulated by a figure perceived as being on ‘the Hindu right’.
Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation 