Are you a professional pillow fighter, or a 95 low-cost time travel agent, or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, Monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. Monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work-related. And with Monday.com, work is just easier. Monday.com, for whatever you run, go to Monday.com to learn more. Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books network. I am one of your hosts, Anamitra Khosh. Today, I am speaking to Dr. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, about her fantastic book, Being Hindu, Being Indian. Lala Rachpur tries ideas of nationhood. Dr. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia. With interests in nationalism, secularism, and religious and political thought, more broadly. After receiving a D fill in history from the University of Oxford, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Multiple Secularities Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and at ICAS MP in New Delhi, India. She is now an incoming Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India, University in Bangalore, India. One year's research has been published in leading peer review journals, such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Global Intellectual History, and Studies in Indian Politics and Religions. Committed to making history accessible to the public, her first book, Being Hindu, Being Indian, Lala Rachpur tries ideas of nationhood was published with Penguin Random House India in February 2024. This is the book that we are going to discuss in today's podcast. Welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you so much for having me, Anamitra. It's a pleasure to be part of the New Books Network. Thank you very much. Okay, so let's get started. And as is tradition here at NBN, we start with a biographical question. So, can you tell us a bit about yourself, and what to do you towards writing an intellectual history of Lala Rachpur? Yeah, so I'm an Indian academic from India, and I did my BA in History from St. Stephen's College at the Delhi University, and a second BA in History in Politics from the University of Oxford, where I also did my Masters in Modern South Asian Studies, and then a DPhil in History. And the BA in History in Politics had a political theory component. So, I got training in how to think more analytically about concepts like liberalism, equality, democracy, multiculturalism. And my BA, MA and DPhil thesis were all under the supervision of Faisal Devji. So, I've been interested in and trained from the beginning in intellectual history. And of course, the Indian context also was an influence on me. So, I was interested early on in Hindu nationalism and the challenge it posed to India's secular constitution and secular state ideology, and also in the contestation between Hindus themselves about how to define Hinduism and Hinduness. So, I felt that there was a need to understand Hindu nationalism and this contestation over Hinduness. And my BA thesis was a kind of comparison between Gandhi and Savalka's definition of Hinduism, and the radically different ways in which Hinduness can be defined. After doing a master thesis on how different Hindus, such as Gandhi and Ambedkar, approach the caste question, in my PhD, I returned to this question of Hindu nationalism and the contestation of a Hinduness. And I thought of working on B.D. Savalka at first, but then thought that his thought has been analyzed to quite an extent by some major scholars. I was also aware of my limitations with Marathi and I simultaneously stumbled upon these 15 volumes of the collected works of La La Lajpatri, which had been largely untapped for an intellectual history of Hindu nationalism. And then what gripped me was finding speeches and writings in which La La Lajpatri, who I'd read of as an early pioneer of Hindu nationalism, as someone who'd laid the groundwork for Savalka at Hindutva, was supporting the Khilafat movement. So, how was this for father of Hindutva supporting a movement in support of an Islamic Caliphate? This is what really kind of gripped me and intrigued me, and I'd also found some documents which showed that he supported the Lucknow, back between the Congress and the Muslim League, and he interpreted India's passionate history to argue that Muslim rulers were not foreign to India, but were sons of the soil. So, all of this intrigued me and I realized that maybe we were missing something out in how we'd understood the history of Hindu nationalism and of nationalism in general. And the two other things that intrigued me were the change in La Lajpatri's nationalist thought over time, and also the internal tensions in a conflict within La Lajpatri. So, I became quite interested in capturing this fluidity in this politician thinkers thought, and which was making it difficult to categorize him. So, that's what led me to do an intellectual history of La Lajpatri. Very interesting to hear about that, very interesting thoughts that you shared with us. So, what led to this book? Can you give us a brief overview of this and of the few core arguments for our listeners? Yeah, so maybe I can start with an overview of the book and the core arguments. So, he examines La Lajpatri's nationalist thought through four different intellectual phases of his active political life lived between 1888 and 1928 so it's a 40 year period. And the book is divided into four parts which correspond with the four chronologically unfolding intellectual phases over La Lajpatri's life. The first phase which covers the period between 1888 to 1900 is when La Lajpatri was articulating the idea of the nation into the senses of the term. So, the pre-nationalist sense of the termination which referred only to a cultural community and did not possess connotations of statehood and a modern nationalist sense of the, the modern nationalist sense of the termination which referred to a political community that must govern itself and possess a state of its own. So, La Lajpatri used the term Hindu nation in the pre-nationalist sense of the term to refer to a cultural community and the term Indian nation when he spoke of the nation in the context of political representation and self-government. He articulated both notions of a Hindu nation and an Indian nation but with two different senses and meanings. And this was also made possible by the fact that in the pre-1915 pre-First World War period, the modern nationalist sense of the termination which refers to a cultural and political community that must govern itself through its own state and still not crystallized as its only meaning. The first world that was still very much dominated by empires, the pre-national sense of the term still circulated and was very much around. And then I come to the second phase which covers the period from 1900 to 1915. And in this second phase, La Lajpatri still continues to articulate the ideas of both a Hindu nation and an Indian nation but we do see him at one juncture in 1901 explicitly reject the idea of a Hindu, of an Indian nation. And this phase also sees him in a speech in 1909 articulate his most robust and full bodied idea of the Hindu nation. So the second phase is fascinating and important because La Lajpatri articulated a very, yeah, this richly articulated Hindu nationalism and which appears to strongly overlap with Savarkar Sindutvap and give credence to the argument that Rai is an ideological ancestor, and laid the groundwork for the Hindu hydrology which comes later which Savarkar articulates in 1923 in his tract Hindutva who is a Hindu. So there are some similarities between La Lajpatri's Hindu nationalism that he articulates in this speech in 1909 and Savarkar's later Hindutva both posit Hindu culture as the poor of the Hindu nation which is seen to include followers of Hinduism. The different followers of Hinduism seeks Buddhist engines but exclude Muslims and Christians. And there's also a similarity in how the two view Hindu history so both see Hindu history as a narrative in which the Hindu nation is crystallized in resistance to the foreign Muslim enemy. But in fact the second phase is fascinating and important precisely also because La Lajpatri's Hindu nationalism remains distinct from Hindutva. So the Hindu culture was the core of the Hindu nation and excludes Muslims and Christians but La Lajpatri's Hindu nationalism imagines Muslims and Christians as distinct religious nationalities with their own distinct cultures. And these are seen to roughly exist alongside the Hindu nation in India and being free to strengthen themselves and they existed in a competitive but also politically cooperative relationship with the Hindu nation in a common Indian polity. So presently in La Lajpatri's vision presently there was no Indian nation but the goal is to unite into this single diverse self ruling Indian nation in the future. And unlike within the top there is no claim that India is the land only of Hindus and all that Hindu culture alone is the forms the national culture of India. There's no demand in La Lajpatri's Hindu nationalism that Muslims and Christians need to abandon their religions and cultures and assimilate into Hindu culture to become part of the Hindu nation. So yeah there's no demand for cultural assimilation and no aversion to India's deep religious and cultural diversity which is accepted as a given. So yeah the takeaway from this second phase of La Lajpatri's intellectual life is basically that we need to recognize that not all Hindu nationalism are equivalent to Hindutva and that there's internal differentiation within Hindu nationalism. And then we come to that I mean this is going to be a bit of a long answer because there are two phases. The third phase is span seven years from 1915 to 1924. And in this third phase Lajpatri for various reasons related to personal domestic Indian and international context firmly shifts from using the term nation in both the pre nationalist and the full fledged modern nationalist senses of the term. To using the term nation only nets full fledged modern nationalist sense. So from 1951 words he shifts from using the termination only to refer to a cultural and political community that needs to express itself in an independent state. And one of the major reasons for this was the First World War that shook his assumptions about the world consisting of superior imperial nations which had the right to rule over other inferior nations. And the war also radically shook his assumptions about the stability and invincibility of this Eurocentric imperial world order, and imagined right to more vividly and realistically imagine the world order is consisting of equal self governing nation states. And as Lajpatri makes this form and decisive shift to using the term nation only in its full fledged modern nationalist sense. He also stopped equating nations with religious cultural communities as signified by his earlier references to separate Hindu and Muslim nations. And he now decided that there was only one nation in India and not more and that this was the Indian nation comprising India's various religious communities. And so between 1915 and 1919 Lajpatri articulated a richly textured nationalist narrative firmly grounded in the idea and in the notion that Hindus and Muslims constituted a single Indian nation. And the other reasons for the shift in Lajpatri's conception of nationhood included his prolonged stay in the US, which expose him to progressive inclusive to a progressive inclusive liberal and socialist intellectual milieu. And also the political reorientation of India's new Muslim leadership. So yeah back home in India which saw a young generation of Indian Muslim leaders questioning the old guard of the Muslim League and moving closer to the Congress and Hindus. Lajpatri welcoming this change political orientation of the Indian Muslim leadership as ushering in the possibility of a new Indian nationalism upheld by Hindus and Muslims. And in response to this he now reconfigured his own nationalist thought to firmly and confidently and decisively shift towards reimagining Hindus and Muslims as members of a single Indian nation. And his third phase is illuminating because during it Lajpatri elaborated what we make all a composite Indian nationalism. So he has, he kind of talks about articulates ideas about Hindus and Muslims sharing a common mixed are in Mongolian ancestry. It is to accommodate and celebrate elements of both Hindu and Muslim cultures Indian national culture. So he talks about both Hindu and Muslim festivals. Like both should be celebrated as Indian national festivals and Indian should be proud of a Harley Mohani and Iqbal as much as Tagore, a Roy and a Harish Chandra, and he praises Akbar as someone who combined in his own person the best elements of Hinduism and Indian Indian should fashion up an Indian public national culture, which is a pluralist plan, similar pluralist blend of the best elements of Hinduism and Islam. And he proposes Hindustani in both scripts as India's national language. And during this phase he also re-interprets India's medieval history to counter its portrayal as a period of foreign Muslim rule marked by domination, oppression and conflict. So Muslim rule was re-imagined as one involving indigenous Muslim rule as entailing socio-cultural interaction, political fairness, religious tolerance and concord between Hindus and Muslims and even exemplifying virtuous Indian governance. So he makes various statements like it's not right to say that Muslim rule was foreign rule, the Muslim rulers were initially foreign in their region, but as soon as they settled in India they adopted the country, made it their home and became sons of soil. He refers to Akbar and Aurangzeb as Indian rulers and is not foreign to India, and has other statements like even, even the most bigoted and orthodox Muslim ruler in India did not possess the kind of social pride and exclusiveness that the contemporary British ruler has towards Hindus, and that under the mughals, Hindus were eligible for the highest officers, various other things about Muslims contributing to the evolution of Indian culture, with Urdu and Hindustani, which he called purely Indian, brought forth as an example. And yeah, other statements about Muslim rulers, unlike the British, rather than exploiting India and the interest of the foreign country benefited India, and Rai also countered portrayals of British portrayals of Muslim rule as tyrannical and violent and argued that there was no authentic record of even Aurangzeb having ordered any general massacre of Hindus. And he questioned whether Aurangzeb had ever seriously tried to overpower or outcast Hinduism and pointed out that while medieval times in Europe were marked by religious warfare and persecution, in India the period of Muslim political sovereignty was marked by relative religious tolerance. Yeah, so the takeaway from this is basically that not all ideas of Hindu nationalism flower into India, and Rai's own Hindu nationalism gave way to a rich distinctive composite Indian nationalist narratives. And the third phase is also important because it's during this phase that after Rajputra's return to India in February 1920, Rai actively supported the Khilafat movement led by Gandhi in a section of the Indian Muslim leadership. This was a movement that aim to preserve the boundaries of the Ottoman Caliphate Empire in the face of European plans to divide it up following. Turkey's defeat in World War I, it also insisted that Islam's holy places must remain under the Ottoman caliph's custody so now for Rai Hindu Muslim unity is considered by Rai as important for Indians for Raj and is also for him now up moral and political principle in its own right. So it's important for Indian national freedom, and for Indian national identity, and so he urges him used to support their Muslim brothers on the Khilafat question. And for him he also sees the Khilafat question as a just religious calls for Muslims as something that violated Islam and prevented Muslims from fulfilling their religious obligations so this dismantlement of the Ottoman Caliphate and kind of the resting way of the holy cities of Islam from under his custody was seen as violating Islam. And he urges Muslims, he gives various reasons why Hindus must support Muslims on this question so even if they don't identify with the Khilafat question is their own cause, they must do it out of a sense of reciprocity and obligation as trustees of Islam. Any question affecting their Indian fellow nationals automatically affects Hindus too. And he also views just like Gandhi, the Ottoman Empire as protecting Asia and India from further European imperialism so for him, it is a religious it's a just religious cause and an imperial cause and a nationalist cause so. And so, I'm going to talk about the last question. And then the last question is about the Khilafat question is about the Khilafat question is about the Khilafat question is about the Muslim religion. And then the Khilafat question is about the Khilafat question is about the Khilafat question is about the Muslim religion and the Khilafat question is about the Muslim religion. The religion holding large with rise entire thought as Hindu nationalism has obscured a crucial intellectual and historical juncture where a Hindu political figure like him, who we consider to be a forefather of Hindutva. Actually, so pan-Islamism is compatible with an even necessary for Indian nationalism. So, while the scholarship on Hindu nationalism has often seen the Hindu response to the Khilafat movement is consisting of so leaf here and resentment. I'm trying to show that this was not the sole Hindu response to it and large patron example of another kind of Hindu response to the Khilafat movement. And then I come to the fourth phase of large patronize intellectual and political life, which spans the four years between 1924 and 1928. And these are the last four years of large patronize life. And this phase kind of explore large patronize turned to the Hindu mass saba following the disintegration of the Khilafat movement in the early 20s, and particularly after the right in the cohort district of the Muslim majority Northwest frontier province, which would rise own Muslim majority province of Punjab. And I argue that rather than turning to him, Savarkar at Hindutva, that was indeed gaining immense popularity at the time or turning to any other variety of Hindu nationalism as a Hindu mass saba leader active in the mid 1920s, large Buddha elaborated yet another new and distinct Indian nationalist narratives. And in the new atmosphere of violence and polarization in the mid 1920s, that's what I identified separate electorates and communal representation as a root causes of in Muslim disunity and polarization, and sought to organize a Hindu politics to oppose these Muslim demands and inaugurate a radically secular Indian nation state. And his secular vision opposed ideas of Hindu theocracy or Hindu state with a state which privileges Hinduism as the established privileged legal religion. It also sought a separation of religion and state to guarantee religious freedom to all religious communities, and a firm equal citizenship equal irrespective of religion. It also considered Muslim reservations in proportion to their numbers in British India's population as a check on Hindu majority and in acknowledgement of Muslim minority fears, and contemplated federalism as a way to also guarantee substantial cultural autonomy to Muslims in areas where they formed the majority, or propose him standing as a national language. So, my argument really is that larger political politics was actually a instrumental means to limit Muslim demands to what he considered a reasonable limit, which which for him was communal representation in proportion to their numbers and within a framework of joint electorate so much of the theory of his militant Hindu politics is directed towards containing demands for an extension of communal representation above the numbers of Muslim numbers in the population. And, yeah, so militant Hindu politics, he largely imagined this politics as being in service over secular Indian nation state, and I try to argue that this secularism is not just a ploy but for Hindu domination but has a positive significance for minorities. And he indeed explicitly addresses Hindus and opposes fantasies of Hindu Raj or supremacy, and tells Hindus that such insanity such dreams of Hindu Raj will ruin Hinduism along with their country. But also that this Hindu politics does have a bearing on his secularism and threatened to undermine its core values of peace and harmony and tolerance and rendered the secularism fragile and unstable. Yeah, that's the long and broad overview of the book, I can also say a little bit more about the core arguments if you need me to. Of course, of course, we'll get into that in the with the next few questions. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, thanks, thanks for this overview, it gives us very rich chronological account of La Rachvathre's life, his intellectual journey and the arguments that you are trying to pose in your book. So, my next question would kind of follow up on this. So, as the title suggests, the book touches on the evolving definition of being Hindu and being Indian at the same time. So, my question is how these ideas formulate within La Rachvathre, vis-a-vis the political situation in the late 19th and early 20th century, that is the dying period when he was most active. Yeah, so I think some of it, we might have already touched upon before, but I'll elaborate a little bit on it. So yeah, La Rachvathre started off as an Arya Samajir, so far as Samajis, true religion consists of belief in one God so kind of being against polytheism and form monotheism. I also believe that God's wisdom or truth is revealed in the Vedas alone, so not in the other Hindu texts or in any other texts of any other religion, but in Vedas alone, and that this God is formless so cannot be, cannot take the form of idols or cannot be in temples. They are against idol worship, image worship, temple worship, also the notion of avatars or they are against holy God-men. So, La Rachvathre was influenced by this religious worldview, but unlike the guruful faction to which he did not belong, which was okay with this Vedic religion being separated or separating off from Hinduism, La Rachvathre and his college faction didn't want this to happen. So, they defined Hinduism itself in terms of Arya Samajis tenets, and the idea was to keep Arya Samajis tenets to a bare minimum, to a belief in one God and his wisdom being revealed in the Vedas. So, La Rachvathre explicitly talks about keeping all dogma in the background and defining Hinduism in terms of a very simple creed because he was aware that too much diversity within Hinduism, and insisting on too many Arya Samajis tenets will prevent Hindus from identifying with it and reduce Arya Samaj to a sect within Hinduism. So, his idea was to kind of define Hinduism in terms of only Vedic monotheism, as this would enable a larger number of Hindus to identify with this minimalist definition of Hinduness and attain Hindu unity. And then at the turn of the century, La Rachvathre accepts Arya Samajis one of the many sects of Hinduism, and no longer defined Hinduism in terms of Vedic monotheism, but simply as a faith emphasizing social unity and national responsibilities. So, Hinduism is not defined in terms of belief, ritual or practice, but in terms of religion, simply advocating social and national unity, and La Rachvathre embraces other, in this period, so in the turn of the century, embraces other non way they can do texts such as the Manusmiti, the Gita, the Ramayanda Mahabharata to make this point. So, to include all, as many followers of the Hindu religion, apart from the, you know, typical Arya Samajis into his definition of Hinduness. So, we see that the imperative of Hindu nation and community building leads him to regularly tailor his definitions of Hinduism and Hinduness, which are emptied of conventional content and defined more in terms of communal and national belonging. And while the nation in the context of self-government, when the nation is talked about in the context of self-government, he frequently still speaks of an Indian nation comprising all religious communities, but it's a weakly defined Indian nation. And La Rachvathre cannot come up with a cultural identity for this nation yet. And in 1909, he kind of explicitly articulates this thought that if Hindu, the Hindu nation is grounded in Hinduism, which he still more or less ceases having the Vedas as its pivot, then this would exclude those who reject the authority of the Vedas. So, the Brahma Samajis or the Sikhs or the Jens or the Buddhist. So, to include them into the Hindu fold, he comes up with a more broad based and Catholic definition of the Hindu nation, which has Hindu culture rather than Hinduism at its core. And yeah, so Hindu culture has made the centerpiece of Hinduness, and even now these definitions of Hinduness were superseded by the notion of a broader Indian nation to which Hindus were seen to belong with other, with India's other religious communities. Once again, La Rachvathre was unable to imagine a common history of culture for this Indian nation. So this only happened after 1915, once La Rachvathre shifted to using the term nation only in its full fledged modern nationalist sense. When he arrives at seeing India as being inhabited only by one nation, and this nation, a nation comprising other, all of India's diverse religious communities. And it's only then when he begins to kind of grapple with this question of so what is the history or culture that binds this nation together. Then he comes up with this shared hybrid ancestry for Hindus and Muslims are pluralist public culture, a history of peaceful coexistence social culture interaction political fairness between Hindus and Muslims in the past and religious tolerance and concord between them so Indianness is really defined in thicker terms by La Rachvathre only in the third phase. In the Hindu masaba phase, when the atmosphere is one of violence fear and uncertainty and suspicion, there's actually little concern with definitions of Hinduness. So, La Rachvathre has used the existence of a kind of given Hindu community that had political interests, which were going to be undermined by the by the Muslim leagues, it's so-called excessive demands, and which needed to be protected. And the question of Indianness what really defines it in any deep or thick way that question is again lost sight of in this new turbulent atmosphere. That is now for him something to be considered or returned to once this excessive Muslim communalism or the excessive Muslim communal demands in his view of separate electrics and weighted political representation in excess of the Muslim numerical proportion and the population. Once these demands are contained and the secular Indian nation is inaugurated. But La Rachvathre seems clear that Indianness is not a homogenous identity and it's not defined exclusively by Hinduist and is respectful of and defined by diversity. So, yeah, this is how his kind of definitions of Hinduness and Indianness change over time. Yeah, of course, of course, we see very sort of a composite ideas from his part in this sense. So, on the thought of notions, I wanted to ask you if you had any sort of preconceived notions about La Rachvathre before you started working on him and if those ideas changed over time. Yeah, so I'd actually read about La Rachvathre as part of my study of the history of Hindu nationalism, which largely always predominantly focuses on the thought of Sallarkar and Gulvalkar. And in these studies, La Rachvathre along with people like Tilak often appear as proto-Hindu nationalists as having articulated an earlier embryonic or nascent form of Hindutva and is laying the basic groundwork for it. So, I also believe that his Hindu nationalist was something like a softer version of Hindutva or a softer version of essentially the same thing. And also, I also had this impression that La Rachvathre articulated this Hindutva like Hindu nationalism throughout his life, or at least from 1909 all the way through to his participation in the Hindu Massa Bhai and the 20s, in the 1920s. But I realized that this leaves out a lot of texture and nuance and complexity and cramps are understanding of the history of Hindu nationalism and also nationalism more broadly. And we need to not reduce all ideas of Hindu nationhood or all Hindu politics to exclusivist or simulationist Hindutva, which I think hampas are understanding, and also hampas projects of democratic dialogue, persuasion and consensus building and actually contributes to polarization. And I think on cast I also learned that we need to take a much more seriously either relatively radical politics of caste that's been articulated from within the history of Hindu nationalism. So, in his second phase, and specifically between 1909 and 1915, La Rachvathre articulated both his most robust conception of the Hindu nation and his most radical ideas on caste. And of course he didn't propose political separatism for the so called untouchables and lower caste, but he did challenge the Brahmin's exclusive right to read the Vedas or their role as intermediaries. The superiority of the Brahmin by birth and hereditary caste hierarchy, and he proposed that the so called untouchables and lower caste be given the sacred thread in the Shuddhi ceremony. And as CS adcock has argued that this did not just constitute a nominal change in their status, but entailed a disillusion of lower caste status, bestowing on them their rightful place in Hindu society. This is what it was often viewed as, and La Rachvathre also personally gave the sacred thread to some domes in UP and challenged pundits there to excommunicate him. And he also argued that Shuddhi was actually not enough Hindus, I mean, ex untouchables and low caste needed to be educated so that he believed that education will lead to lead them to realize the wrong that was done to them by arrogant Hindus as equal them, and it would help in producing leaders amongst them who could then, you know, give leadership to these communities and challenge caste prejudice. And he argued that there were no, there had been no casteaboos in ancient times and no taboos on inter living or interdining or intermarriage and these needed to be broken in theory and practice. And even from within the Manus Mitti, whether rightly or wrongly he kind of gleaned evidence of inter caste marriages, and he compares, you know, up a caste to slave owners who subject untouchables to shocking and cruel treatment and he makes various appeals on the basis of, you know, human rights, humanity, democracy, the age of equality, social justice and modernity. So, yeah, this can challenge my assumption that Hindu nationalism is basically conservative on caste. And of course, there's some, there's truth to that, but I think the story is more complicated and Hindu nationalism has also coexisted with caste radicalism and this needs to be taken seriously by even those who oppose or disagree with Hindu nationalism. And yeah, also this recognition that someone who was closely associated with Aria Samad in the first phase of his intellectual life can participate in, you know, the Hindu mas, the Hindu Sada movement in the second phase. Be friends with socialist slide Sydney web and the civil rights activists W.E.B Dubois, articulate a secular pluralist composite Indian nationalism and support the class with movement in the third phase of his intellectual life. And then even join the Hindu masa by in the final phase of his life in the political context changes so such complexity and fluidity resists easy categorization and large, but I was someone whose friends with labor politician Ramsey McDonald and supported the trade union movement in India, but also became a prominent leader of Hindu communal politics through the Hindu masa so we need to, I think we need a more complex vocabulary to capture these kinds of counterintuitive ideas and this kind of politics. And there are many people like him I think historically and even today that don't fit into these neat conceptual categories and, you know, underneath labels and we have to do that extra work of going beyond these and in order to produce better understanding and even to do better politics. And yeah, I mean, related to this large but rather long to the Hindu masa but not just subscribe to a Hindu nationalist ideology, which is one, which is what one would assume. So he organized the new politics but long for the secular Indian nation, which, yeah, as I've said, was attached to the notion of a Hindu majority, but didn't fantasize about homogeneity or Hindu supremacy or domination. But in fact, a firm equals citizenship and respected diversity and considered Muslim reservations to check as a mechanism to check Hindu majority and domination. But yes, the secularism is rendered fragile by its articulation alongside a Hindu politics that threatened to undermine it. That's also true. Yeah, yeah, yes, so these sort of very complex categories need to be more problematized as we are working on people like Lakshpatri or his contemporaries who could not be fit into certain categorizations. Could you elaborate a bit more about rise concept of Hindu politics and how it differed from other Hindu nationalist ideologies at that which are relevant at that time. Yes, so I mean, in 1901 he articulated the need for an all India Hindu, you know, all India and do politics, which would serve the Hindu nationality. And this Hindu nationality as we've seen was seen as, you know, existing alongside the Muslim and Christian nations, which in turn was seen as possessing a similar right to protect and promote them just through similar associations and organizations. And then in 1999, Lakshpatri attended the first to Hindu political conference of the Punjab, where he said that the Hindu nation needs to strengthen itself and promote its interest just as Muslim legal doing with the Muslim nation. So, the aim was to unite into a Hindu into an Indian nation, but this was imagined as, you know, possible only by first strengthening the Hindu and Muslim nation. So, because I was actually trying to analyze and understand, Lakshpatri's thought as a developed and shifted over a 40 year period, while taking into account the context and engagement with which his ideas were produced and without erasing nuance and fluidity and the internal tension and consistencies, this was already a very complex task. So, I was therefore actually unable to compare him and his thought with all the variously textured Hindu nationalisms that existed during his lifetime. But I decided to stick to comparing his thought with the political thinker and actor he's most often clubbed with that is V.D. Savarkar and use this comparison as a way to highlight the internal differentiation within Hindu nationalism. So, the most important distinction between them as I've said before I think already is that, that Savarkar demanded that Muslims and Christians abandon their foreign religions and cultures and assimilate into Hindu culture, which is defined as the India's national offense. And if they don't do this, they are relegated to second class citizens, and in Lakshpatri's Hindu nationalism and Hindu politics in a second phase, when he articulated his most robust Hindu nationalism, there's no such demand for religious abandonment and cultural assimilation. And unlike Hindutva, there's no claim that Hindu culture was the culture of India or that India belonged exclusively only to Hindus, which is unlike Savarkar's latest slogan of Hindustan Hindu caste. And unlike Hindutva, there are also no dreams of Hindu cultural supremacy or domination and there's a basic respect for India's religious cultural diversity. So this is the main, I would say this is the main difference between Lakshpatri's Hindu nationalism and his Hindu politics and Savarkar's Hindu politics, apart from, I think, Savarkar's very explicit also valorization of violence. And similarly, in the Himalayasabha, Lakshpatri's Hindu politics was instrumental, it was conceived as instrumental to establish a secular Indian nation state. And which kind of imagined the wall of separation between religion and politics and guaranteed what I said before religious freedom equals citizenship, federalism, Hindustani and even Muslim reservations in proportion to their population. The Hindu politics of course, as we've already seen, this is different from Savarkar at Hindutva and also different from the Hindu politics of others in the Hindu mass of the time, such as, you know, N.C. Kalkar, B.S. Munjay, Vipar Manand, who are guided by an ideology of Hindu nationalism, like, for instance, Vipar Manand, so Hindu Muslims is separate nations who are antagonistic and so India is belonging exclusively to the Hindu nation. He also imagined a strongly and brazenly majoritarian Hindu state and was that would be guided by very homogenizing ideas of one language, one religion, one culture, which are absent in Lakshpatri. Yes, I think this response appears and the book in general in my reading challenges, perhaps politically motivated conclusions about rise ideology in recent decades that we have seen. So, where he is essentially rediscovered as an ideological ancestor of Hindutva that you were hinting at at the start of our conversation. So, what do you have to say about this? Yes, and I think this hasty and politically ideologically motivated conclusions, they've interestingly been made from both sides so on one side we have Hindu nationalists who claim Lakshpatri is their ideological icon. And so we see Kiran Baidi during a Delhi state election campaign putting a scarf around Lakshpatri statue in Delhi or we have the BJP Minister of Culture in 2016, you know, getting an exhibition on Lakshpatri, or the RSS weekly organ the organizer paying a tribute to Lakshpatri describing him as championing a politics mark into its own, rather than the supposedly anti Hindu and pro-Muslim politics of the Congress. And so the complexity, Lakshpatri's thought in politics is ironed out to appropriate him for the ideological ends of the Hindu right, and this is also a way of bolstering the legitimacy of this project. And on the other hand, this impression about Lakshpatri is affirmed by historians who've similarly overlooked the complexity in Lakshpatri's nationalist thought to put him under a new nationalist umbrella. And this stems from, I think, an inability or unwillingness to understand in all its complexity and nuances, the worldviews of people who aren't similar to us. So, quite different from us. And then we fail to understand a complex body of political thought that lies somewhere between Savakarit Hindutva and the Congress's official ideology of Indian nationalism, which very likely also continues to exist today, this body of thought. And as I said, this hampas are intellectual and political understanding and also hampas projects of depolarization and democratic persuasion and consensus building, which I think I'm important. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. So, in this sense, was Lakshpatri's complexity that we are talking about throughout this conversation was this product of his own times, and was his ideological wavering that we see in different phases of his life, or evolution, if you may call it, common among the other emerging nationalists of that time as well, or is it unfair to judge his religious nationalism by present day parameters. I think, yeah, I've found this a difficult question to answer and I struggled with it so I'd say that it was this ideological fluidity or wavering I think was more common than we think so particularly in the first two phases of Lakshpatri's life so till 1915 his shifts between the ideas of a Hindu, between the ideas of a Hindu nation and Indian nation and his oscillation between the use of the term nation in the two different senses a pre nationalist in a modern nationalist one shows that this, it happened because the concept is in flux and in the making in order public discourse, and the modern concept of the nation is around and is even strongly held by some but it's less widespread and has not begun to resolutely challenge the idea of empire so and the pre nationalist sense of the term nation is still circulating so it's very likely that others to grapple with this conceptually unstable and fluid environment and this would have affected their thought to. At the same time it's it's likely that there were people like Gandhi and who did remain more consistent and how they defined the nation in India so for them India was never inhabited by separating the Western nations and you know always inhabited by only one Indian nation they didn't make any shift like that like Lakshpatri did so in that sense Lakshpatri belongs to a particular category of political thinkers or politician thinkers as I call them who are relatively more ideological, ideologically malleable and much more radically responsive to changing political politics than others. But I'd also say that it's quite possible that if we look at a politician thinker today who has you know who has to respond to fast changing contingencies, the contingencies of everyday politics, and if we study, you know, the thought of such a political or his, his or her active political life we might find, fluidity and even internal internal, you know, inconsistencies or tensions which aren't too different from what we find in Lakshpatri although of course Lakshpatri lived at a time of world changing events and you know massive political change such as the world, you know First World War, which brought about the kind of particular kind of intellectual and conceptual change which we rarely see today. And as for judging Lakshpatri's religious nationalism by present day parameters I'd say that with any historical figure or a body of historical thought I think you need to first situate it within the political and intellectual context of its time of course. And Lakshpatri's Hindu nationalism seeking to instill pride in Hindus takes on a different meaning when you situate it in the context of, you know, say the colonial and missionary criticism of Hinduism and Hindus, again, something slightly derogatory that a Muslim is to crat official like society, the hemat Khan might have said, or the time when the Hindu majority did not possess political power and lived under colonial domination. And at a time when Lakshpatri lived in Punjab where Muslims were a majority in Hindus were a minority. And so Lakshpatri's Hindu nationalism is different from the Hindu nationalism of today's right where you don't have in India a context of colonial domination and humiliation and Hindus form an overwhelming majority, and are over represented in all power holding institutions since 1947. But at the same time I would say that some evaluative and normative parameters are universal across time so the question of whether or not Lakshpatri's Hindu nationalism was discriminatory or exclusionary in its attitude to religious or whether it sought equality or hierarchy or domination. These questions will be on the question of context and apply to both our times and to Lakshpatri's times as well and we should evaluate his nationalism. Yeah, you can evaluate his nationalism according to these criteria. Yes, yes, there is also what I was thinking when I was going through the book before this interview. So, as we sort of try to wind down, one of my last questions would be what were the major challenges in writing a book like this because the person in context is a very multilayered person and of course a very complex person as we understood throughout our conversation so my question would be how you navigated these sort of challenges that you may have faced and if there are any areas in the book that you would like to take up as well in the future. Yeah, so, yeah I found it very, very challenging it was a constant struggle in an internal turmoil within me also, as I was trying to grapple with Lakshpatri's fluidity. Of course, it's an intellectual, not a biography but an intellectual biography and so the primary focus is on his ideas and particularly on his ideas of nationhood. So this narrowed it down of course but still what was challenging was to not to, I tried not to impose anything from above and kept it inductive to really follow the intricate texture of his reasoning. However, a strange order counter intuitive, these appeared at first so this is something I've learned from my former supervisor, so they do does it really well. And I was careful not to reduce or iron out the shifts and changes and the inconsistent inconsistencies that were appearing in his thought, both over time and within shorter periods of time. And this means that you have to constantly keep reconciling in making sense of these changes these shifts and these tensions and these inconsistencies, which is extremely time consuming and intellectually difficult. And one had to also track his often quite unself conscious use of terms and concepts and identify when he's using what word in which sense, and this kind of prompts you to really strive for analytical clarity, which is also really difficult. And I was, yeah, wanted to be sensitive to the shifts and the changes and what causes the shift so was it a global event like the world, you know, first World War, or a regional or local event like the cohort riot. Or was it because of a new milieu that he was immersed in like, you know, progressive circles in the US. The political realignment over another political actor or other political actors like the Muslim League so you have to constantly kind of reconstruct that context and situate large polarized thought in relation to it. So the challenge was also to not write a history of ideas that was artificially abstracted from political history. And every day politics but one that shows how ideas were produced in the tip of, and in engagement with politics so yeah how I navigated in these challenges was basically to be more and more conscious of them and more and more self aware and sensitive to them. Yeah, as for the areas that I didn't research which I would wanted to and would want to in the future. I think I would like to explore the question of, yeah, this precisely this question of intellectual change and fluidity, much more, what precisely makes thinkers like large that relatively more intellectually malleable than Hobbes or Gandhi or a Tagore of course these things also do change over the death what changes over time they do have internal contradictions but large but I think is a qualitatively different type of thinker who is relatively more unself conscious and therefore less systematic. And so yeah what what are the sources of the disc fluidity and what are the implications for intellectual history as a discipline and as a methodology. And I would have also like to explore I think the conceptual relationship between the extra institutional and militant politics of Hindu song on one hand and the democratic politics of mass mobilization on the other. So how can militant Hindu cult militant Hindu song at hand be accommodated by the concept of democracy what is the relationship between the two so I hope to write about both soon. Hopefully hopefully we hope for that as well. So this will get a very good idea of the content of the book and from the, from your experience that you shared just now would understand these complexities much better. So, my penultimate question is in terms of public history contribution, what do you think your readers will take away from this book. Public history. I think I mean I hope that it is that there are primarily that there are different ways of defining Hinduness and different ways of being Hindu and being Indian. These can either be equated or they can be distinguished and this is a choice and for instance right now the public debate is often you know the assumption is that there's one kind of nationalism and there is either more commitment to the nation or less commitment to the nation so it's more about more and less, whereas what I hope to do through this is to show that they are different ways in which the nation can be imagined and that there is a choice and one needs to reflect upon it and make that choice much more, you know, consciously. And just also maybe conveying the complexity of history or the discipline and how that knowledge is built what my book is built upon is also you know multiple are the less and less and less of knowledge produced by the people and also what it takes to produce this and just the complexity of it. Definitely of course as we are all aware history or even the people in history in concern are never black and white so these colors of their intellectual thought and in this case La Rajpatra is intellectual thought comes out very well through your book so thank you very much for this great overview. And the last question as is the first question is biographical so I would like to ask what you're working on currently and what we may get from you in the future. I've just submitted an entry on the area some are actually for the Oxford bibliographies and Hinduism, which is a very good and useful encyclopedic resource published by the UP but apart from that I plan to start working on my next research project which is which seeks to create a contested contested history of the multiple secularism that circulated in colonial India between 1885 and 1947 so yeah hopes to highlight the diverse ideological basis of secularism in India and are not either to hidden historical conceptions of secularism and also shed light on how this concept came to be deployed both by champions of India secular constitution and the right which challenges it. Sounds very very interesting yeah so hopefully that turns into a book as well in the future and we get to have you here as well. I just wanted to say that I'm a huge fan of the new books network and I, you know it's so such a nice and useful network I wish I'd known about it during my PhD but I'm a regular list now the new books network podcast so it's great to be on here finally after listening to a podcast podcast for like four years, it's lovely. You can listen to yourself as well. Okay then. Thanks for your time. Yes, read conversation. [Music] (gentle music)
